Summary
Get Played hosts discuss the evolution of comic book video games, from classic arcade beat-em-ups to modern AAA titles like the Arkham and Spider-Man franchises. Guest Jordan Morris, writer of the upcoming Predator Bloodshed comic series, joins the conversation about how game design has finally caught up to the power fantasy of being a superhero.
Insights
- Modern superhero games succeed by translating iconic powers into engaging mechanics—locomotion (Spider-Man's swinging) and combat feel (Batman's counters) are more important than story
- Licensed game adaptations historically suffered from structural constraints: movie tie-ins, small dev teams, and competing stakeholder notes from studios and publishers
- Comic book games have evolved from simple reskins of existing game templates to IP-specific design that respects source material while creating unique gameplay experiences
- Character-driven narrative games (Telltale, Dispatch) offer an alternative to action-focused superhero games, using choice and consequence to explore emotional conflict
- Transparent and colorful console aesthetics from the late 90s/early 2000s represented a lost design philosophy that modern hardware has abandoned in favor of monochromatic minimalism
Trends
Shift from licensed movie adaptations to original comic-based game narratives with longer development cyclesRise of narrative-driven superhero games (Dispatch, Guardians of the Galaxy) that prioritize story and character over combatIncreased focus on power fantasy mechanics that authentically represent superhero abilities rather than generic action templatesGrowing appreciation for indie and mid-budget comic adaptations (Predator Bloodshed, Skud the Disposable Assassin) alongside AAA franchisesNostalgia-driven demand for transparent/colorful hardware aesthetics as counterpoint to current minimalist design trendsIntegration of comic book visual language into non-licensed games (Beautiful Joe, Comix Zone) as aesthetic and narrative toolTelltale-style choice-based games becoming established format for superhero narratives with moral consequence systemsTurn-based RPG combat resurgence (Persona, Yakuza, Elden Ring) attracting players previously bounced off by real-time action systems
Topics
Superhero Power Fantasy in Game DesignLicensed Video Game Adaptations and IP ManagementComic Book Game History and EvolutionCharacter Action Game MechanicsNarrative-Driven Superhero GamesTurn-Based RPG Combat SystemsGame Developer Constraints and Studio PoliticsConsole Hardware Aesthetics and Design PhilosophyTelltale-Style Choice-Based Narrative GamesSpider-Man Game Franchise SuccessBatman Arkham Series ImpactIndie Comic Book Game AdaptationsFighting Game Character DesignOpen-World Superhero Game DesignVideo Game Localization and Censorship
Companies
Rocksteady Studios
Developed the Arkham Asylum and Arkham City games that revolutionized superhero game design with responsive combat
Insomniac Games
Created the acclaimed Spider-Man and Miles Morales games that perfected web-swinging locomotion and open-world superh...
Activision
Published Fantastic Four games that were constrained by competing studio notes from Fox and Activision licensing requ...
Telltale Games
Pioneered narrative-driven comic book games including The Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us with choice-based storytelling
Capcom
Developed Beautiful Joe and multiple Marvel vs. Capcom fighting games; also created Street Fighter 6 with character c...
Marvel Games
Oversees Marvel IP licensing for video games including Ultimate Alliance and Guardians of the Galaxy titles
DC Comics
Licenses DC properties for games including Injustice fighting game series and Batman Telltale adventures
Sucker Punch Productions
Developed Ghost of Tsushima and other character action games discussed as influence on superhero game design
NetherRealm Studios
Created Mortal Kombat and Injustice fighting games featuring DC and Marvel characters with story-driven campaigns
Sega
Published X-Men arcade game and Genesis X-Men game with innovative fourth-wall-breaking reset puzzle mechanic
Nintendo
Discussed for Switch hardware colorways, Alarmo device, and talking flower accessory from Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Sony
Publishes PlayStation exclusive Spider-Man games and hosts Marvel Rivals on PlayStation Plus
Apple
Released Vision Pro with Apple Arcade's Retrocade app featuring photorealistic arcade cabinet emulation in AR
Obsidian Entertainment
Developed Greedfall and other character-driven RPGs discussed as examples of turn-based combat success
Dontnod Entertainment
Created Life is Strange and narrative adventure games in the Telltale tradition of choice-based storytelling
People
Jordan Morris
Guest discussing his upcoming Predator Bloodshed comic series and experience adapting IP to different media
Heather Ann Campbell
Co-host discussing comic book games, Vision Pro Retrocade experience, and Dragon Quest VII Reimagined
Nick Tiger Weigher
Co-host and former game developer who worked on Fantastic Four games; provides industry perspective on licensed adapt...
Matt Apadaka
Co-host currently playing Resident Evil 2 Remake and Kaizen: A Factory Story; discusses game mechanics and design
Rob Schrab
Creator of Skud the Disposable Assassin comic adapted into Sega Saturn game; discussed as example of early indie comi...
Kevin Conroy
Reprised Batman voice role in Arkham Asylum games from animated series, elevating game quality through casting
Mark Hamill
Reprised Joker voice role in Arkham Asylum games from animated series, contributing to game's critical success
Rory Coleman
Illustrating Predator Bloodshed comic series alongside Roland Boschi; known for X-Men comic book art
Tetsuo Nomura
Kingdom Hearts creator whose complex lore reportedly confuses even the director; watches YouTube lore videos for clar...
Ryan Johnson
Director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi; discussed for introducing Luke's astral projection Force power to cinema
Quotes
"I think Superman should be played like a speed run game... you have to choose how many people die."
Matt Apadaka•~1:45:00
"The thing about Mortal Kombat that will always kind of make it my side piece is that the characters always feel like just reskinned versions of each other."
Heather Ann Campbell•~2:15:00
"They figured out that locomotion. They figured out how to make you feel like you're moving like Spider-Man is really the most impressive thing about that game."
Nick Tiger Weigher•~1:35:00
"It is a predator as in aliens versus predator comic. Yes, so it is canon. It is in continuity."
Jordan Morris•~0:45:00
"The game's best joke... it takes place in the metropolis of Torrance, California."
Matt Apadaka•~2:05:00
Full Transcript
This is a Head Gum Podcast. Oh man, I'm really excited. We've got a fun episode here. We've got a guest coming. Great guest. You know, I think I've prepped a list of some stuff. I'm going to talk about some of the comics games that I played when I was a kid. I think we could probably touch on modern titles. I don't know if there's anything you want to hit, Nick. Well, yeah, I mean, like, I'm not... I think sometimes people think that I assume because I'm a little like into dirty stuff that I have this encyclopedic knowledge of comics, but I'm actually not the biggest comics guy that's kind of like one of the Olympic rings of nerdom that doesn't quite, you know, overlap for me. But I do have a lot of fond memories of the old X-Men arcade game. I want to talk about that Hulk game, which is really fun. You run up buildings. What? What's wrong? Oh no. What's wrong, Matt? What's going on, Matt? I misunderstood the prompt. Oh. I've never played a game like that. Oh. What do you mean? I've never played it like a... What are you saying? A comics game. Like games from comics? No. Like comics. Yeah, okay, but like what? Well, like, I mean, like, there's that Superman game. Oh no. There's a few of them. Superman 64 is pretty bad. No, no, no. X-Men, Spider-Man. No, no, no. I did too much. Comics. I misunderstood. What do you mean? What are you talking about? What do you mean you misunderstood? You seem so stressed. I'll say it. I went to the dark web. Oh. Purchased some games in preparation for the show. Didn't do anything else. You purchased the games? You purchased the games off the dark web? Whoa. Looked with Bitcoin? I had to, well, yeah, it was the other thing. I had to get a Coinbase. I had to do everything else that you had to do to get those. Right, sure. We all know. I'm so nervous about where this story is going. Yeah, where's this going? I bought these games because it was like, oh, it'll be interesting in these games that I've never played or even, you know, had heard of at this point. But, you know, I got Super Seinfeld 64. What? I played, I played the Greg Fitzsimmons Golf Extravaganza. I played the Maria Bamford Treasure Tracker. I played the... Maria Bamford Treasure Tracker. Yeah, she finds... Are these romheads? Is this a mod of Captain Toad? Yeah, but it's with Maria Bamford. It sounds pretty good. She's funny. It's good. You know, I played, at one point, I was playing the Ralphie Mae Racer. Oh boy. Matt, so I think I can understand your mistake here. I'm starting to believe that instead of comics, meaning comic books, meaning largely superheroes, although that is a form of media, not a genre, there's all sorts of comics. You took that to mean stand-up comics. Yeah, and I just did so much prep. I played hours and hours with a Bill Maher talking simulator. Oh. Yeah, you played Delia's Quest, didn't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was actually... That was DLC. Yeah. Yeah, that was tough. That was tough. Yeah. Matt, when we were on text thread this week and you kept saying, I want to die, I was like, Matt, going through some, it sounds like you subjected yourself to some terrible games. I thought all of them were bad. I thought it was just a typo when you were saying you're playing Fluffy's Air Ride, because he must mean Kirby's Air Ride. Kirby is Fluffy, but no, you don't mean that. You mean Gabriel Glacius. Fluffy's Air Ride was actually pretty good. Yeah. I liked that one a lot. I loved the Wanda Sykes puzzle quest. That was really good. You also have, you gave Hamar... You could match three Wanda Sykes game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fun. And each three is like different things that, like sort of things that she says. I'm laughing. They're all really fun. Yeah. I remember you, there was like a, on Tuesday you said you were really enjoying Dane Cooking Mama. Yeah, Dane Cooking Mama was good. I also liked the Tom Papa DLC. Oh, that's fun. Yeah, he's just in there. Yeah. Good Papa. But yeah, none of the... Yeah, he became good Papa. You all right? Yeah, well, I have some other games coming. Oh, you do really? You got more? You ordered tangible copies off the dark web? I got Carlos Mincia Combat. Uh-huh. I got Dave Chappelle. Is that just the title? Dave Chappelle? Is that a whole title to it? I got, I just bought one of his specials. I thought it was like one of his old ones. The good stuff. Yeah. Killing me softly era. Killing me softly era. And I got the Rodney Dandruffyld rhythm game. Sounds pretty good. You getting some respect playing that? Well, here's the thing. I have some really bad news. What's that? Can't get no respect. Well, I'm sorry you're stupid, Matt. I'm sorry I'm stupid too. Yeah, it would have been a lot easier if you were like a smarter guy. Well, here's the thing. If I was smarter, when I bonked my head, it wouldn't sound like a freaking hollow coconut. Yeah, that's the thing. But I mean, you know, I think this will be fine. I think we'll figure it out. I think you've got some probably some other comics games that you can discuss that you've played in the past. John Malanian and Ray Nenia. Okay, all right. We're just going to start the episode. We nerf superpowers and hear many versions of movie scores as we dig into all things comic book games this week on Get Played. Welcome to Get Played, your one stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between. It's time to get played. I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Tiger Weigher. That's me, Nick Tiger Weigher, alongside our third host, Mr. Games himself, Matt Apadaka. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the premiere video game podcast where I rushed us into the intro because we were talking about Star Wars off pod and it should be on the fucking show. We were mid conversation. I think someone was mid sentence and Heather just started the show. But hey, that's why the mics are on. Here's the thing. We were talking about whether or not Leia's move in the last Jedi is a new force power or a preexisting force power. And I say it's a preexisting force power because we've established that you can like look at a lightsaber and it pulls towards your hand and then you can clutch it. And that's because the mass of the lightsaber is less than the mass of your body. So if you're in space and you do the lightsaber move towards a ship, you will move towards the ship. I will say it's not even constrained. I think that's that's well argued, but it's not even necessarily constrained in the canon prior to this by by the mass of the object or manipulate. Because Yoda, of course, famously from the swamps of Dagobah pulls up and it looks X-Wing. But he's like he's small too. Right. But he's not small. He's small. But he's not he's doing a different thing. He's levitating an object. Right. He's not force pulling. You don't think he could you think he'd be limited at force pulling it towards himself. I think he'd be able to do that. Yeah. I think if you tried to force pull towards the ship, he'd just fly out. I think we I think we figure this out. I think it makes perfect sense. Now let's get into this. How can Dexter Jester own a diner? This is a great question. I assume that he got like a loan from the equivalent of the small business administration and Coruscant. Okay. And then he kind of used that as startup capital and then just built a following over the years. There was a family business. There was like a Reddit thread that was like, did people actually hate the prequels or is that like a joke? And like tons of people in the comments were like, no, they actually hated the prequels. I don't understand how you could watch the new movies and then go back and watch the prequels and not have these same questions about Dexter Jester. Yeah. I mean, look, they everything invites questions for ultimately these are movies for children. And I think that's just like, you know, for thing that I spent most of my life thinking about that that's the intended audience. I've been chewing on this for a couple of minutes. I feel like I just have to ask it at even at the risk of it being a dumb question. Yeah. We could all agree. Flight. Hold on. I'm just trying to really wrap my hand around what I'm trying to ask. Choose your words carefully. I'm not doing a bit. I'm being 100% sincere about this. Are you wondering? It feels like this is an opportunity for me to like immediately dunk on you for no reason. And then you'll have my experience on a podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just be ready with no idiot as soon as I'm done talking. Okay, great. Here we go. Here we go. But yes, he answered your question and they fly now. Okay. Okay. I'm going to go first. I rescind my question. I kind of feel like like levitation through powers like through like like like some sort of psychokinesis. Are you asking if levitation is different than flight? Kind of. But I also think that like through like psychokinesis that is like flight is that if you don't have like wings or something. I think I think a bird, you know, obviously there's some sort of biomechanical. Yes. Thing that is or just just an engineering feat that allows for an airplane or a helicopter to take off or for a bird or a teradactyl to fly. Yes. So you think Superman is psychically moving through the air? Kind of. I guess there's Magneto's flight, which is done by magnetism. Right. He's manipulating magnetic poles around him. Right. Isn't that flight? I don't know. I don't know why it was so hard for me to ask or why I was so scared. Well, I'm glad you asked it. It was brave of you. You never know what's going to make Star Wars people. I don't know. You never know. It could be some weird thing. It's just this little idea that from our conversation that came into my brain. I was like, I think I got to ask. I don't know. Is Luke's, here's a question about novel Star Wars powers introduced in the sequels. Is force powers, is Luke's astral projection new? Or is that just a like a terrestrial version of like a force ghost? I think that one is the power itself is not new because it was pre-established in like the Jedi encyclopedia prior to the existence of the film. It was just like, oh, we haven't seen this in a movie. Let's put it in a movie. But is it the same as being a force ghost but like corporeally? Yeah. Yeah. I think no. You think no. It's a different thing. I think it is a new power that we hadn't seen, but it is not a new power created by Ryan Johnson for the film. Got it. Well, I had a bullet point in my notes to that I talked to Matt about how I went to islands yesterday. I guess we don't need to do that now. We've talked about Star Wars. Hang on. Let's introduce our guest. Wait a minute. Hang on. Wait a minute. What did you get at islands? I got a long border, which is there. It's like the big wave, but they've got like the spread instead of the like the, the Thousand Island instead of the mustard. Okay. Yeah. Long border with cheese and then I got myself some fries. It was, I was there for a late lunch. So it was kind of the like the afternoon happy hour. You got the $5 Mai Tai? No, I was like, if I get anything to drink right now, I'm going to fall asleep and I had to work afterwards. So I, but I got the passion fruit iced tea, which is my favorite islands on alcoholic drinks. So I had a great time. Then it sounds like you got any chicken tortilla soup for the table. Well, for the, for me? Yeah. I was there by myself. Soup for the table is a fun move. Everybody passes around one bowl of soup. I guess it is never ending. It's refillable. So like you could get one cup of soup, six spoons. I'm just going to have a little bite. I usually, I'm usually sharing it with my wife. So it's not gross. That's cute. But, uh, Lady in the Tramp in that thing. Why is it, why is it weird? It is free. People always split a dessert. You know, you would never split a soup. Soup is kind of like, it's kind of like, I don't know, it's kind of like drawing a bath and then going to someone else getting it after you. I think what it is, is that because you are putting, it feels like because you are immersing the thing that you've put in your mouth fully in the broth, fully in the soup substance, that that is kind of polluting all of it. That's maybe not how the germ transfer works. Yeah. As opposed to like you're digging into a shared plate of pasta. Maybe the same thing is happening, but it doesn't feel as disgusting. Even an ice cream? Ice cream, yeah. It's 2026. Share soup with your friends. Yeah, we can share soup. Germs are back. I do kind of, yeah, germs are back. Yeah, we had a little while where we would kind of like get the un-germs. Yeah, germs, now we're like, oh yeah. Also Drake, he's back. Drake's also back. There's no consequences. Here's the thing I would say. I feel like with the refillable soup, and hey, maybe you got a cool server, I feel like you're kind of abusing Island's policy if you're getting one soup and sharing it, because that's intended to be one person's portion. We have to cut this. I cannot, I cannot come out looking bad like this. We have to cut this. You look fine. I've fucked you. It's cute. People like, you're a wife guy and a soup guy. Look, I am primarily those two things. What guys are often soup guys? It was recently I went with some friends and a friend of mine said, and I quote, man, you're really like soup. I was just kind of listing the soups. Fuck, we didn't talk about dinner yet. Oh, no. We're going to put a dinner order in. We have to pause. We got to get Cocoa Ejibanya. We'll stop down. We'll get, we'll put in a dinner order and then we'll come back and introduce you to the next. Jordan, we get dinner in between the course. So we can do a second one. So yeah, we're going to get you some dinner, of course. Number four. One big soup coming up. Hey, buddy, this time of year always makes me rethink what's in my closet. Trying to keep fewer things, but better ones. Pieces that are well made and easy to wear all the time. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. I really do. The fabrics feel elevated. The fits are thoughtful and the pricing actually makes sense. Quince makes high quality everyday essentials using premium materials like 100% European linen and their insanely soft flow knit active wear fabric. Their men's linen pants and shirts are lightweight, breathable and comfortable. Basically the perfect layer for spring. 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You thought the rent was too damn high? Look at your phone bill. And then come talk to me. I'm gonna switch. I'm tired of this. They can't do this anymore. They can't do that. The quality of the service is great. And look, who doesn't like saving money? You'd be a fool not to. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash get played. That's mintmobile.com slash get played. Upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5 gigabyte plan required, equivalent to $15 per month. New customer offer for first 3 months only. Then full price land options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. We've all had those nights. The ones where you laugh until the sun comes up. Where conversations go places they've never gone before. And you walk away feeling closer to the people around you than you have in years. That's psilocybin. It doesn't just open doors in your mind. It opens them between people. This episode is brought to you by Schedule 35. The most trusted name in psilocybin products. Whether you're microdosing for focus and clarity or taking a full recreational dose to reconnect with life. Schedule 35 makes every experience intentional. Consistent and precisely dosed. These aren't party drugs. They're connection tools for your mind, your creativity, your relationships and honestly, maybe your soul. Go to schedule35.co and use code get played all caps one word for 15% off your first order. That's schedule35.co code get played for 15% off. Our guest today, Richard into the podcast, always such a treat to have him, one of our favorites. A writer and podcaster. His new series is Predator Bloodshed, available February 25th at your local comic book store. Jordan Morris is here. Hi everybody. Hi Jordan. My phone. What happened? What the fuck just happened? So my phone has the Death Stranding 2 sound. Yeah, I know that. I have my ringer on for three people. My mom. Okay. My in-laws. My wife. My wife knows I do this every week at this time. But calls me every single day at this time. Is she okay? No, she's just calling to probably tell me that she's in traffic on her way home. Jordan, all I can do is say I'm sorry. Hey, that's okay. I'm sorry. It's totally fine. It's not your fault. It was fun to hear the sound. I liked hearing the sound. If it makes anybody feel better, I'll scream at her when I get home. Oh my God. Jesus. Just share some soup. What the fuck? You can't do that in front of my guest. No, I still haven't played DS2, so it was nice to get a little preview of some sounds I might be hearing when I finally pick it up. All the sounds in the game are really, really good. They're fucking awesome. They're great sounds. They're excellent, excellently engineered sounds. Jordan, congrats so much on prior Blexi. Thank you. What an awesome franchise to be working on and what a talented guy to hand the reins to. Cut it out. As part of this, I know you're making the cons around. Yes, I'm doing cons. That involves an extensive amount of travel. What's your travel gaming routine? Oh, yeah. I like to take the switch when I'm on a longer trip. You're still on switch one, switch two? Still on switch one. I have not, the thing to make me buy the switch two has not come out yet. Interesting. Huh. Huh. That's really interesting for you to say. That's really controversial when we said that on the podcast. Unbelievable. Seems like a pretty bare statement of thought. I've waited into something. I swear they didn't pay me off. I just said that because it was a thing. You didn't pay us off. Sony did. We're a bunch of fucking shills. It's interesting you would say that because it's very similar to what Nintendo said on a shareholder phone call this week was that the system is selling weaker than expected outside of Japan. So it does track the data itself. And we know we know that there's a multitude of reasons that people don't have it and haven't been able to get it. Yeah. Come on. Yeah. It could be economic. It could be social pressure. But it sounds to me like the reason you didn't get a switch to is that there isn't a reason to do it yet. Yes. And people are going to be mad at us for this. Yes. I mean it sounds like podcast listeners are reacting normally to things as they always do. We love them in their normal reactions. What's also difficult about this conversation is we love our listeners. We do love our listeners. Of course. Thank you. But they fucking shed February 25th. Grab it. I love you. Oh shit. Now my phone is ringing. Hello. Oh hi Sony. Yeah we said what you wanted. Yeah. Put it in the big bag with the dollar sign on it. Now he's making kissing noises. Kissing them? He does that on every phone call. Yes. I listen. I love Nintendo. We all love Nintendo. I'm going to buy that fucking thing. I've resigned myself to it. Getting the thing and setting it up. It just doesn't have the game yet. As soon as I do a Mario or Zelda trailer I'll buy it. How much do you love Nintendo? I will sell a lot. Do you love Nintendo enough to get the talking flower? I've not gotten the talking flower. I don't have alarmo. So maybe I love them 7 out of 10 or 8 out of 10. Okay. That puts you Heather higher than I would have guessed. Do you have a flower? No I have the alarmo. You have alarmo. But I cannot figure out the use case for the flower. I don't think I've seen the flower. What's the flower? The flower was a recently announced toy, accessory, based on the talking flower from Super Mario Brothers Wonder. It is a... I like that flower. It is cool. It speaks on its own. It is not AI guided. It just has an enormous library and encyclopedia of phrases at its disposal. One of the selling points is it might tell you the time which may be correct is how they positioned this sort of mischievous friend, friend, friend, friend, friend, friend, friend, friend that you might keep in your room to just once in a while say things. My favorite... So it lies occasionally? It lies occasionally. It's part toy, part broken cloth. My favorite thing is that one of its, again, demo phrases on the box. Is it asking the question, where am I? Which... Wow. I saw and I laughed for about five straight real world minutes being like, why would you make a toy that asks where it is when you cannot share the information with it? One way existential dread. Anyway. Sometimes it'll tell you a parent's past away. Sometimes they have it. Sometimes they have it. And I think that's part of like the fun of being a Nintendo fan is like being mad at them, you know? Like being a part of it. Yeah. I think you see this with sports fans, getting mad at their favorite team and, you know, when your favorite... Star Wars fans. Star Wars, yes. Just to pick a random example. Maybe from time to time they can get mad at odd, small, slight things. Sure. So yeah, I don't know. I'm a Nintendo fan. Maybe I'm not going to buy the flower, but I love that they made the flower. Of course. And that's part of why they're so great. I think we should get the flower and turn it on during a podcast and just see what it says once in a while while we're trying to do a show. Get the flower. Yeah, apparently phones don't need to be muted, so that sounds like a... Oh boy. The phone is muted. This is going to be a spicy one. You don't have to do this to me. I'm going to yell at my wife. So your comic book is, and I think the joke would be, oh, Predator, Predator, Predator, oh, Predator, Bloodletting? Bloodshed. Predator, Bloodshed. What is it? Comic about Epstein? Like that angle? But I think instead I'd rather ask the serious question. Thank you. It is a predator as in aliens versus predator comic. Yes, so it is canon. It is incontnuity. Fuck, oh my God, I love canon so much. Me too. They told me it was in canon. I said, oh, it is canon. I went, ah. So it happened. That's awesome. And so the premise of Predator, Bloodshed, it's going to be five issues, and it is going to be what if the predator got loose at an underground fighting tournament, much like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter? Oh. It's kind of, I'm thinking about it like this is a movie someone wrote in 1997 that they never shot. It's like it would be Predator three. They're like Mortal Kombat is huge. Let's put him in a fighting tournament. They just for whatever reason didn't make the movie and now it's a comic book. That's kind of how I'm thinking about it. That sounds fucking awesome. The idea of Predator in Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter does make you feel like Scorpion and Sub-Zero are just pussies who are about to get fucking murked. Yeah. Like I can't imagine anybody in a fighting tournament winning if the predator is in the fighting tournament. Do you know has Predator been like DLC for Mortal Kombat at any point? He has. He's in Mortal Kombat 10 or X? No matter what. I think he was one of those guest characters. Oh wait. His finishing move was like his laser cuts up something. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I remember. So it's already kind of out there. It's already that idea of him in a fighting tournament is already kind of like in the ether. But yeah, we wrote a five part story about it. Art by Rory Coleman and Roland Boschie who are all doing beautiful jobs. Who's art you know from the X-Men books and it comes out February 25th. That's amazing. Rory Coleman. Thank you so much. I am so happy for you. I'm so happy that you did this. Thanks. I'm excited too. I can't wait for people to check it out. And yeah, it's really fun. It's nice. I know I'm a weird choice for it. When they ask me, I'm like, that's a weird choice. Wait, why you? Why is that weird? You know, just kind of have a more of a comedy resume and it's a house and dark humor in it. Sure. But it's a little more of a straight forward. Thanks a lot to me. Smart cool guy. Gets to write a cool, smart comic book. I've been, baby. I know. Man, what am I? You're a wife? No, I'm not screaming at you. Maybe I should call you here in the podcast. No, thanks. I'm really stoked. I like love the predator. And yeah, I think this is like a fun, cool story for him. So yeah, I'm stoked for people to see it. I'm not as like super, you know, in the weeds with all the predator video games, but there have been a couple of good adaptations, both alien versus predator games. There was an alien versus predator side scroller beat him up from 1993. That one was awesome. And then the alien versus predator FPS game was pretty, like pretty decent. Yeah, I played that one too. And that one's very fun. You could be all three species, third species being man, right? Who if you think about it, it's kind of the ultimate monster. Wow. Man does keep killing these things. Yeah. Right. On their world, they have horror movies about man. What movie is it called? God. I'll scream. Steven. Yeah. It's always to like the colonial, you know, projection of man's motivation is always like, how do we make money off of this thing? How can we monetize, like, you know, taking out this species or harvesting their organs or whatever the fuck. And you might see a little bit of that satirical angle in predator bloodshed. So the gambling ring, they like start betting on the predator. Man's favorite thing is greed. I didn't steal that from Heather. It was already in the hands. So people read it. Just bleep it. Just bleep the whole set. Just bleep the whole set. Awesome. I like when people yell at you for like stealing something and it, it portrays that they have no idea how long it takes to make something. Yeah. Yeah. So that happens. And the other thing that happens is I found this when I'm working on something, podcast fans will be like, that sounds like a Weigher joke. And I was like, I've been on this for a month. Especially if it's something anime. Yeah. Someone read that joke two and a half years ago. And on this show that Weigher's on, it's five or six years. Do we? When you, you're going to cons, you're meeting people. One thing I do like about this, we were at, we were at Comic Con for our Doughboys comic and you do get a moment with everybody, you get to talk to them. Does anyone ever like, you must encounter podcast fans. You must encounter with Jordan, Jesse Goh fans. Or fans of yours on other podcasts. Yes. Believe it or not, some podcast listeners are nerds. If you can believe it and will come to comic book events. Yeah. No, it is always nice to like meet somebody. Cause you know, like comic book fans are like very particular and sometimes are kind of like grilling you about the thing a little bit. And it's nice when a podcast fan comes up and they're just like a friendly face who likes your yucks. So yeah, that's always nice when there's a little overlap. It's funny to think of a podcast fan as being like an oasis in the middle of it. Yeah. Save me from this guy dressed as Deadpool. I know you're also dressed as Deadpool, but. Deadpool has questions about the Predators brain. Sure, yeah. I will say that I've gotten to do some IP comics and I've gotten to work with some like very fun IP, the nicest, sweetest fans, Godzilla fans. Oh. They're such sweeties. They're just excited. They love all Godzilla, even the bad Matthew Broderick one. It's yeah, they're, they're really sweet and they all come out to stuff and line up and dress up and they're all very fun and sweet. So a lot of, a lot of great fandoms out there, but ooh, the Godzilla fandom full of sweeties. Well, Godzilla is good. Yeah. It's good. And you're walking the walk, you're wearing a Godzilla t-shirt now. I am Godzilla versus space Godzilla. Very cool. Which before the podcast, you said that the reason space Godzilla exists is that particles from Godzilla went to space and made space Godzilla. Yes. And then you said, shut the fuck up. I said that was more story than I needed. I don't need all that. You were, to be clear, you were right to do that. I said that. I think so. It was funny. I like it. We've maybe talked about this in the podcast before, but is it Godzilla versus Beoletta? Is that what, I'm trying to remember the name of the, there's the, there's an organic plant. Violet. Violet. Violet. I like that. I mean, I really like that movie. I watched it for the first time like last year. Me too. It's really good, but there's like a moment in that where, because it's like a science gone wrong thing as these things always are. He'd created a Beolonte to. I think it has the like spirit of the scientist's dead daughter. Dead daughter, yes. It's imbued within it. And then it is like this organic plant matter that can be a kaiju that can be a Godzilla. But of course it goes completely awry. But you know, it's like, I feel like a lot of times you get to make it a little my whole scientist and one of these things like this. And they're like, I was advancing humanity, you know, they're like self righteous and whatever. This guy like, like the Beolette comes up the guy's like, I should not have done this. My bad. Have you guys seen the trailer for the second season of Monarch Legacy of Monsters? No, but I mean, I watched the first season. I know you liked it. I liked the first season of Monarch Legacy of Monsters and part of what I really liked about it, Jordan, did you watch it? I watched half of it. OK, well, I really I watched all the way through it. Godzilla makes appearance at the end. He makes a smaller appearance in the middle, but mostly he shows up at the end to wreck house, which is structurally correct. What I liked about it is the sort of very straightforward government story about how post World War Two, they set up a facility to study kaiju and what the financing of that looked like. I was like, this fucking rules. I mean, Godzilla movies are largely about infrastructure and like red tape. Yeah, I think that's that's part of the second season trailer seems like they've done away with that sort of thing. More bureaucracy. And it's just we got to get Kong. We got to get Godzilla. They got a they got to fuck up this new monster. And I was like, well, on one hand, I'm excited that I'll weekly get basically a Godzilla movie. Every fucking week you get a Godzilla movie. But am I a little bummed that it's just a retread of Godzilla X Kong? Sure. Yeah, a little bit. I got to say, I can't remember which one it is. I'm certain I've said this anecdote before, but I was watching one of the newer Godzilla movies with my mom and then Mothra makes an appearance at one point in one of them. And she just leans over and says in my ear, beautiful. So sincerely. So sincerely. It's so funny to me. One more quick observation about Godzilla versus Bio Lante. If you don't mind doubling that. Let's do it. That that movie takes place in a world where Godzilla has attacked before. And so like there's evidence of him around. And at one point the characters grab drinks at the Godzilla Memorial Lounge. Like, I don't think you could get a meal, but you could get like light bites. Right. Before you go to dinner, you go. You won't meet at the Godzilla Memorial Lounge. It's like French fries arranged like buildings. Hey, who am I? If you watch a Godzilla movie, there's a good chance you're going to be like, you know what, I like Godzilla. Like they're all kind of fun. They're all fun. I mean, I've certainly seen ones that are like this one is not very good, but I still enjoyed it. Yeah. I mean, that is really heartening to hear that this wholesome nature of the fandom. Yeah. They just embrace it all. Yeah. They love it and they're very sweet. That's awesome. Is there a, and speaking of IP adaptations, is there a game in particular you'd be championing it a bit to do a comic adaptation of? And I can answer to give you some a moment to think, but for me, I'd be really intrigued by the challenge of adapting something in the mass effect world. I think it's just such a cool universe with such sprawling canon. And I think you could focus on a small part of it, like, like, you know, just, just focus on one character or set something just as some, just stories of the Citadel or something like that. And I would certainly probably be intimidated at the prospect of, I know there's a Baldur's Gate series that got announced recently, but anything that was specifically touching the Larry and Baldur's Gate, I'm just like, that, that feels a little bit over my head at that games too, I mean, too close to me. Why? Oh, it's because it's too close to you. Yeah. It's because it's because I just like, I care too much about it that I feel like I would be in my head about trying to do it justice. I think I would want to do, if I, if I was going to like adapt anything into a comic, I'd want to do a Legend of Zelda comic without any dialogue at all. That's awesome. Like I would just want it to be panels and panels and panels of art telling the story. Like Primal. Yeah. That's fucking sick. Oh yeah. I, I, it would make sense that I would say, like something in the world of Kingdom Hearts because I love it so much, but like honestly, like just wrapping my head around the lore and I also, I have friends that have worked adjacently to Kingdom Hearts things and it's like a lot, it's like a big pain in the ass. Like it's just a, it's a nightmare. There was like a story recently, the Tetsuo Nomura watches YouTube videos of the lore when he gets confused. Like just like as an example, like getting Sora in King, in, in Smash Brothers, there was like that almost like didn't happen like last second. Like it was just like, there's like, there needs to be a story reason for him to be in the game, which is like just too much. They're thinking about it too much, but my answer would be God of War because like it would, it would just be sick to like do like a big panel of like him like climbing a Titan's back or some shit or like, or, or fighting a Titan. I can only think of Titan stuff right now. I think Titans are really, Titans are really cool. Titans are good. That's cause you know, part of the reason that I think they're so cool is that they're so big. That's sort of the main thing about it. If I'm really thinking about it for a second, I think I liked them a lot because they're really big. They're really big. Honestly, a point of commonality with Godzilla, who we also like, who is extremely big. He's also pretty big. Yeah, he is good. Big is good. Good. How about Jordan? How about you? Oh boy. Okay. So there are blood-borne and Dark Souls comics. I think they're not funny enough. I think you, I think if you, if you leaned into how bleak the world is, it could be like, yeah, I don't know. I think you, I think those are maybe funnier than people give them credit for. No, for sure. Have you read the Elden Ring manga at all? No, I've heard it's cool though. I've heard it's hilarious. Like it's like, it's supposed to be really funny. Yeah. Right. Cause there is like the grim hilarity of like, for instance, in Sekiro, you're like fighting a boss and then you kick him off a bridge and he's just like, my son. Your son? I mean, I didn't think you didn't have a son. I didn't think I could specifically know you. Yeah, I think stuff like that. And it's like that prompt in Elden Ring when you like go up to the NPC you had been talking to and just, it gives you the little like text box, she died. Well, so yeah, I think if you could lead into that a little bit, I think with like comic, I think comics readers accept weirder tones. Yeah, right. I think they're like, they're more inclined to go along with like a weird tone. And I think you could do that a little better in comics than you could in like a movie adaptation, which might have to be a little more of a straightforward fantasy thing. Just from a standpoint of like pure fun, I also think like adapting something like the Capcom final fight is like, it's just like, it's so ridiculous and so broad. It's just dudes punching dudes. Sure. Yeah, from the, I mean, what's a better character than a fighting mayor? Yeah. You know, like, but it's just about the election. On the last page, he starts to fight. Then it's just about him. It's just like a political realism comic. And then like on the very last page, he punches an assistant. Aaron Sorkin walking talks every panel. Right. Yeah, it is just like the West Wing. At the end, he picks up a pipe and says, time to go to work. Wait, what? Martin Sheen doing that the end of the West Wing episode. Picks his shirt off. Wearing one shirt. He's wearing a white coat. I have to call Guy and Cody. Who? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who? Ola, buddy. One in five Americans have learned a new language on their bucket list. 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You predate me on this show. I guess I'm an older character than resident evil merchant. Your character? Yes, I am. In a sense, we're all characters here. I mean, we all don't, we all wear masks. Who are the real you guys? Well, I mean, I'm really me, but I'm just saying like, you know, you have a little bit of a, just slightly affected persona just by the virtue of a charaktenuto microphone. I am an Andy circus though in motion capture. We're all sort of Andy circus. You guys have mocap? Yeah, we're mocap. I'm blown away by the performance. You should really be blown away by ranch who's fully animatronic. Ranch is a true. Yeah. Whoa. I feel like I've never sweat before and I'm sweating right now. I was going to tell you right now, you definitely have. I would characterize you generally as drenched. You might not call us that. It's not always sweat though. It's not always. That's true. Sometimes I'm all in a fountain. Well, yeah, you saw something. It's a siren sort of lured you. Who is that? What are they doing in there? They're like, try out with me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes you're in the, you see the friends and you got to do the bit. Yeah. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Open and closing an umbrella. What? That's what they do. I was just recounting what one of the bits was. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, I got it. You were just standing. Yeah, yeah, I was trying. Taking improv classes is good for the brain. That's great. You know what? I would say you'd be one of the least strange people in an improv class. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's on my bucket list. Oh, okay. Well. Uh, mad up, Madoka, what are you playing? I'm glad you threw to me. I also, I just have to call us out. There's like a bug in here. And it's like, it's fine. I don't think, I think it maybe came in with the merchant. I don't know if it's getting, if it's flying in the frame or not, but I'm, I'm watching this thing. It's not my bug. I'm playing. I trust you. Okay. You have, but you have one. You know, I have all of them. I've tried, I know which ones I have. All of your, I have all the bugs. All bugs. Um, I am playing, I'm playing a game from your franchise, Resident Evil, uh, merchant. I'm playing Resident Evil two remake. Wow. And let me just tell you, let me just say this real quick. It's really, really good. It's too fucking scary. It is several degrees scarier than the only Resident Evil game I've played, which is Resident Evil four. And I think part of that is because in Resident Evil four, Leon seems very capable. He's a badass. He's like roundhouse kicking people. He's like suplexing, uh, grannies infected with Laplaga and stuff like that. He just seems like he's got this. Yeah. It's more of an, I mean, like the people of character as it's more of an action game than a horror game. And it's, he's more like Ash, Rem Evil, dead. Like he's like an extremely capable protagonist to your point. In this one, he's a wimpy cop. And there's a big guy, Mr. X, who we're talking how big, good. This guy, big, bad actually. He's a little too big and he's too scary. And what he does is just lumber toward you and just walks and picks you up and like, well, pick you up, throw you. He's really scary. The zombies are a lot scarier in this for some reason. Uh, and I, I would say I'm having a bad time actually, but I'm, but the game is really, really good. I've only played the original on PlayStation one when it came out and I did really like it. But yeah, I do remember it being scary at least in PlayStation one terms. I have not played the remake. Jordan, did you mess around with Resident Evil two and in either form? Yes. So I played the first three on PlayStation and then I played the number four on GameCube when it was a GameCube exclusive. I remember that. I do. Yeah. Uh, you looked great on the GameCube. Thank you very much. Yeah. High on graphics for its time. For the time. Um, and that remaster really looks great. The remaster sucks. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Uh, so yeah, I have not been back to play any of the remake remasters though. Um, I kind of want to. Resident Evil, it's, it's in the ether again because of nine or what are they calling it? Requiem. Requiem. Yeah. Which is why I'm playing this one because I've only played four and four remake, uh, and four VR. Uh, I only like the fourth one. Okay. For a way, one of the all time great games. Yeah. Oh sure. But, uh, because Leon is back in this new one, I was like, I gotta see what else Leon's been up to. Uh, I have not, um, I have not, uh, uh, installed it yet, but, uh, I saw on PlayStation Network a flash sale for some of the Resident Evil games. I'm like, I should buy one of these. I should go back in and play one I've never have. Yeah. When I got that I have not opened yet. It's seven. I heard that's amazing. Yeah, yeah. Uh, so anyway, I've heard a lot of people talk it up. Oh, uh, your course, Mike Mitchell, especially big Resident Evil seven guys. Yes. Uh, so I'm looking forward to booting that up soon. Nice. I'm playing that and I'm playing a game that I think Heather's also playing. Oh, uh, yes. I started playing it because I saw you were playing it and I didn't realize I could do that yet. Yeah, you could do it early. Dragon Quest seven reimagined. Wow. But I'll, I'll, Heather, take it away. Well, well, hold on. I was going to say, if the Mr. X is too scary, there's a mod you can install. I'm not talking about Elon Musk. What? Because he turned Twitter into X. Is that what you were? Oh, Mr. X. Okay. Okay. I'm not afraid of his bitch ass. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're nervous about Mr. X in the Resident Evil two remake, there is a mod that lets you turn him into Thomas the Tank Engine. No, that's way scarier. And the footage, if you, if you, if you're willing to look it up on YouTube is compelling. I'll check it out, but I can't imagine being less afraid of a train running at me down a hallway. There's a full, there's a full game that got released, I think partly inspired by that in similar mods. I, I've tried to remember what was called as something like Choo Choo Charlie. I'll look it up in the Steam store. Oh yeah. Well, you're fighting a villainous train. You're fighting a villainous train. And I think it was pretty well received, but I never got around to playing it. Yeah. Well, you, you come at it from the opposite stance. You don't want to see them depicted as villains. You love the train. No, yeah. The train's doing nothing wrong. I will take your, your tip off and, and talk a little bit. I did, I was in a blue mood and then I was looking on social media for help to alleviate my mood, which is the opposite of why most people go to social media. I was going to say bad start. And discovered that yes, you could play final or no, Dragon Quest seven reimagined two days early if you got the digital deluxe version. So I purchased the digital deluxe version for switch to justifying the existence of the console. Yes. And. Cause you either that or take it out back and shoot it with one hook. And, and began to play it from the start because I hadn't downloaded the demo on it. And I'll say after two hours of playing that game, I felt good. It's a kind of healing fun time. It's just, it's just, it's just nice. It is nice. It is, it is a, it is a pleasant experience, but that wasn't actually what I was going to talk about on the pod tonight, which was that as a vision pro owner, I, I, I have to once in a while evangelize for the system because it is an extraordinary piece of technology. The Apple VR. Yes. The Apple, the Apple vision pro. And today or maybe it was yesterday, um, Apple Arcade, so an official Apple product released something called retrocade. And I sent you guys some, uh, some screenshots and I'll, I'll show you, uh, uh, Jordan, uh, one of these screenshots. Um, this is, uh, what the, uh, what it does is it puts a full size, um, photo realistic playable arcade cabinet in your physical space. Insane. And you can walk up to that machine and play, uh, uh, old games. That rips you up. You have a nice lighting in your house. Thank you very much. Um, but the, the lighting on the cabinets is also reactive to the lighting in your room because the fucking machine on your face is so powerful. And there is, uh, inside of the cabinet, reflections of the light from the CRT on the sides of the cabinet based on your movement inside of the game. And it is extremely engrossing. Like you walk up to the machine, uh, it is, it is built for, um, you have a Bluetooth controller. So you can set up any Bluetooth controller with it. I'm considering getting a, uh, a wooden box that is the height of one of these arcade cabinets because I have a Bluetooth joystick and then I will be able to actually stand at the machines and play. It is also designed as a, um, an experience where you have to unlock the other machines, which personally I was very frustrated by initially, but after I played the first two cabinets, I was like, Oh, I would have never spent this amount of time on space invaders. Right. Sure. I would never have appreciated space invaders this way. And the longer I spent at that cabinet, the more warmth I felt towards it because I was also appreciating the extremely emulated design of the cabinet itself. And what I mean by that is that it is a reflection of the CRT on a virtual mirror with art that is then superimposed on it, like the cabinet itself, which if you stick your head into the cabinet because it's a VR, you can go in between the planes of the machine itself to look at how it was built. No way. If you walk around the back of the machine, there's like smudges from somebody moving the machine into position. It is, it is fucking realistic. Crazy. If they can find a way to like pipe in a pizza smell and just make you feel like you're at lamppost pizza on Lake Forest. I could just put a pizza in the fucking room. Yeah. Or buy a candle. But you can, you can like, you can either put the machines in your physical space or you can go to a virtual 1980s arcade. And there is a sort of like a dropdown menu and that dropdown menu has spaces for other eras. So I can only assume that as this is updated that you will be able to choose a 70s, 90s or 2000s arcade. It fucking rules. And I really want to do an episode where I bring in the Vision Pro so you guys can experience a lot of these fully barricaded, like behind an enormous accidental price point. Yes. High end virtual reality experience. Yeah, we got to do it. If fuck, it's so good and nobody gets to do it and that sucks. My dumb ass when you sent that pic of the Space Inscavators cabinet to the group chat, I was like, oh, Heather got a cabinet for her new place. Like that's literally, I was completely fooled by it. That's how realistic it looks in the, because also it's mixed, it's AR. So you're not looking out of VR experience, you're having a full AR experience and it is photorealistic. It's fucking crazy. It's fucking awesome. The game, by the way, the train game that we were mentioning is called Choo Choo Charles and it's a villainous spider train. You are battling with your own train. Look at the design of this. It's pretty cool. Spider train is pretty awesome. I got to wish list this thing. Because that guy looks like he's a hungry train. Jordan, what are you playing? Yes. So I beat a game recently that I really loved. I don't know if you've heard of this one, Clear Obscure Expedition 30. I know I'm the first one to ever talk about this game. On this show, you absolutely are. Yeah. Ranch Finish Clear Obscure. Oh, nice. Way to go, Ranch. So I love hearing people talk about turn-based RPGs, but I always bounce off of them. I've bounced off of Persona. I've bounced off of Yakuza. I like want to like these games. They just don't really click with me, but Clear Obscure just totally fucking got me. And it wasn't even that I loved the story or the look of it that much. I like those things. I wasn't like, you know, I know some people get so sucked in by the story of this thing. I liked it, but just that fucking combat, that just that chunky, perry, dodgy combat. Oh, I loved it. I thought it was so cool. And I definitely did the thing where, so slight spoilers for the structure of this game, which I think is interesting. So once you get to like the end, the world opens up dramatically. And before you fight the last guy, you can, you know, go out and do all these alternate dungeons and see all these new worlds. I think a lot of people before they fight the last guy are doing like a big exploring the world thing. And then you go back and you one shot the boss. Okay. And like, I think it's happening to a lot of people. I definitely had that experience. I'm like, oh, that was very easy after fighting nine insane, insanely hard guys. Anyway, that weird thing aside, I thought it was a great game. And now I'm like, maybe I'm, maybe I'm turn based combat guy now. So I do want to try Dragon Quest seven. I maybe want to go back and do a Yakuza. Just maybe now that I have the rhythms of the thing a little bit more. I know they probably all won't have that parrying and dodging that I liked so much. But maybe now I just like have locked into that method a little bit more. So yeah, now I am going back and doing another game. I bounced off of Final Fantasy remake, Integrate. Okay. So I bounced off that on the PS4 when I was fighting the house. Do you guys remember fighting the house? I do remember fighting the house. That house is hard. You fight a house, it's hard. And I'm like, maybe I'm not into this. And now I'm like, maybe I'm going to go back. So I got the PS5 version is on PlayStation Plus. So I reinstalled it. I'm having a good time. I'm almost back at the house. So we'll see what happens. I love the remake and rebirth quite a bit. Finish both of those. Turn based, I also like, I was just playing Octopath Traveler. Oh, that's another one where I'm like, maybe I like this now. It's pretty good. Those original Final Fantasies are all like pretty fun to me also. There's a lot out there. Turn based is back. I've always loved turn based, but this is also just my own gaming preferences. And I think as far as what you like, Jordan is like, because the uniquely active nature of Claire Obscura game, I didn't finish, but I enjoyed what I played. I do find a return to it. Expedition 33, chain of memories. Order the final. Interagram masterpiece. Birth by sleep. RE, Melty Blood. What? I'm RE in all these now. The one, the recent game I can think of that does have a pretty kinetic and active feel to the turn based combat is Sea of Stars. I beat that recently. OK, all right. Stars is great. Really fun. Yeah, I got that just from liking the aesthetic so much when I saw it. And yes, I thought that also kind of had the pairing and dodging. Yeah, really fun little game. But maybe some of our listeners can toss you some more Rex if you like to play on Spear Expedition 33 and our mentions. As far as what I've been playing, I shall not talk about Bellatro this week, even though it occupies most of my thoughts. You absolutely can talk about Bellatro as much as you want. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. Heather, the same way that you are, you self impose a week's where you're not going to talk about Fortnight. Just like I'm just going to talk about Bellatro. It's fine. I get other things to talk about. One of those is Crossplay, which is a New York Times gaming app, New York Times, the lifestyle brand that everyone loves. It's just a sleeker version of Words with Friends. But I'm really enjoying it. It's slow playing turns against people in my NBA group chat. You're just playing competitive Scrabble, but it's exactly the sort of game that can draw three minutes of my attention at a time on my phone, which is about all the gaming I can do on my mobile device. My wife and I have been playing Crossplay every day. I am bad at words, so I am not a challenge for her. Now she has a list of people that she is playing against every day. Because I, again, I'm not even within 100 points when we finish those rounds. Are you playing against my wife also? No, but I'll send her a request. I'm fucking real. I love your shit house by Mary. I know we're going to get here, so Matt, I have been eating soup with your wife. We went out for a bisque and said it was just going to be a one time thing. Biscuits, okay. Chili okay? Hey. We've talked about this, I think chili is kind of, is chili soup? Oh boy. I know we don't have all the time to look for this. Chili's a stew. Chili's a stew. It's not exactly a soup, but if someone wanted to be like, you'd see it on the soup side of the menu, you know? I don't know. It comes, it can come in a bread bowl. Yeah, it can come in a bread bowl, but I think chili is chili. Yeah. Taxonomically, it's not exactly a soup. Wait, if something comes in a bread bowl, it can't be soup? No. No, it can be. Okay. So, what do you think the crucial test is? If someone's like, you want a sandwich? And I was like, yeah, I'll take a sandwich. And they give you a burger or a hot dog. You'd be like, that's technically a sandwich. But this is not what I was thinking of when you said sandwich. I think the same thing like, hey, you want a bowl of soup? Like, I'll take some soup. And they gave you a bowl of chili. I think you'd be kind of like, this isn't exactly what I was thinking of with soup. You should have asked me if I wanted a bowl of chili. Yeah, you're right. You're right. But I don't know. But maybe it is soup. We don't need to get pedantic about it. The game I've been spending more time with is... Is urine soup? It's a great question. How warm we talk in? Hot. Okay, yeah, I think hot urine is soup. But if you said, can I have a bowl of soup? And somebody gave you a bowl of urine, would you complete me? This isn't soup or I've never had urine soup? My complaint certainly would not be this isn't soup. My complaint would be this is piss. Are there vegetables? Are there other ingredients? It's a broth. Okay, it's a broth. Yeah, I think just like hot piss, I would just smell piss. And then I'd probably honestly taste the piss to confirm whether or not it actually was. And then it'd be repulsed that you serve this to me. You would have an assumption that it's piss, but just to make sure you taste it. Because I feel like there's no way that this person just gave me a bowl of hot piss. So I'd just be like, smells kind of funny, but all right. I didn't have a taste of it. Smells kind of like piss. I'd better taste it and make sure. But wait a minute. How would tasting it confirm anything unless you're familiar with the flavor of it? Let's just say I can familiar with the taste of piss. The game I've been spending more time with is Kaizen A Factory Story. This was developed by Coincidence and released in June of 2025. It went on Steam. In some games, I had my Steam wish list along with that Terminator beat them up, that Terminator 2 beat them up, that everyone says is great. Oh, I heard that's really fun. Yeah. So I was just waiting for it to go on sale and it went on sale, so I picked it up. I'll read the Steam Store description. Kaizen is an open-ended puzzle automation game from the original Zachtronics team set in 1980s Japan. Design, build and optimize production lines to create iconic products like calculators, camcorders, and arcade machines. So the aesthetic is really cool. And assembling an 80s Japanese clock radio is really satisfying. I really like the look of all the consumer electronics of that era. However, I will say this game is not exactly what I expected. I was expecting something a little bit more open-ended, like a factorial or a satisfactory. But this is instead more of a puzzle game with a pretty linear narrative. Each of these are like, hey, we're going to assemble this camcorder, figure out how to put it together. And then there's like kind of it, not that there's only one solution, but there's a pretty, there's only a limited number of solves in terms of figuring out the order of operations of the mechanization and where all the pieces are placed on a grid. And then once you figure it out, it kind of just takes care of itself. Maybe as you get deeper into the game, things are getting a little bit more advanced. But so far with what I played of it, it's not, again, what you're getting from Factorio, which I spent more time with, where it's like you kind of have this open-ended sprawling, like perpetual motion machine you're making. And what I was intrigued with when I read about this game initially is that instead of becoming this world-spanning phalanx of power plants and forges, this would be like, oh, actually, we're going to really get in the weeds in terms of how to assemble this graphing calculator. And it's not exactly that, but it's still cool. And I do like that this game has a linear narrative, which I was not expecting. Like I really was not expecting any sort of story in this thing. And it's cute, and it's light, and it's kind of compelling. And it's very much in that era as you're an American who's transported into the world of Japanese business in the 1980s. I'm hypnotized by the fact that your watch has been dictating all of this. Whoa, I didn't even realize that. Yeah, you turned on a Siri at some point, and it was transcribing everything you said in an attempt to solve the question you were asking. I'm good luck. Anyway, I do like the game. It's like, oh, just please catch scratch fever. Maybe that's what he wants. Catch grunt me, Merse. I do still like it, but I just have a little bit of that feeling of like, I don't feel like I quite got what I felt I was promised. Not necessarily even the fault of the marketing of the game. I'm just saying sort of, I just assumed it was a different sort of factory game. I have one small pet peeve, which is the very first bit of gameplay is from what I can tell an utterly inconsequential rhythm game, but it just comes out of nowhere and you're like, wait, I'm doing this. And it made me sort of think like, am I going to be dealing with this throughout? It's just a weird one off. It's a weird way to ease you into the pool, you know, because I always feel like we've played enough games where you kind of want to like start things off with like, okay, this is an introduction to the kind of game I'm going to be experiencing. But that's a minor thing. I'm overall enjoying it and I'm impressed by the design. I think on the balance, I find rhythm games to be fun, but a game that then introduces like, here's a rhythm game just for a second. I typically don't like that. No, I don't like when there's an RPG and then there's like, hey, there's a side quest where there's like a rhythm game thing. I'm like, all right, fine. I mean, like if it's a dedicated rhythm game, I can have fun with. Yes, absolutely. I'm on the same page with you there. Let's talk about comic book games. Jordan is a comic book guy. We figured this was a world that you would have some familiarity with. And it's something I can speak with limited authority on. I worked in game development previously and two of the first three games I worked on was as a level designer in Fantastic Four games. So I have at least, I do at least have some hands on experience with figuring out how to implement superpowers in game design. But but I guess we could start more generally. Where is everyone on comic book games? Like like like where is everyone on super? I guess superhero games is the thing we think of first, but it's not necessarily exclusive to that. Yeah, not necessarily. I mean, I think you can't talk about comic book games without talking about that. Great. Side scrolling beat them up based on Art Spiegelman's mouse. Yes, it's typically typically superhero games. Yeah. And like it seems like it seems like they're just now getting into a superhero game feeling like you want it to. Yes. Yeah. It seems like the technology always kind of limited. There were some good ones of our youth. You know, the X-Men arcade game. I think we'll have fond memories of. If you go back and play that, not a great game, but like, you know, fun to do in a pizza place in, you know, 1989. It does round up the homies and everybody picks somebody. Well, it does feel like the power fantasy, too. In the same way that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, I guess you could argue your comic book games did at this. Yeah. At this thing. Yeah, sure. Those arcade beat them up. I thought for, for to some degree, we would also be covering comic book games like Comics Zone for the Genesis. Oh, yeah. Why not? So Comics Zone for the young listeners was a video game where you, the player entered into a comic book that was the structure of the level design. Yeah. You were moving from panel to panel, both vertically and horizontally in a comic that was made up for the game itself and speaking to characters in the game in speech bubbles, but largely just beating the shit out of everything he came across. And it was gorgeous for the time. Holy shit. I went back and looked at footage of it today to be like, is this going to be one of those things that I have drawn sort of a Halcyon haze over? And it's going to be kind of shitty to look at. And I was stunned. It still looks great. Those late period Genesis games look awesome. When they kind of figured it out, like Vectorman looks very cool. Vectorman looks fucking great. The Dolphin. Yeah. These are all very neat looking games that like optimize the Genesis. Yes. And yeah, at Comic Zone, you could kick them through the panels. That was always a fun move. Yeah. You could jump up and down between panels above and below, which would also limit other characters access to the panels you were in. And the ending of the game was not yet drawn. And so you were kind of like on how I never beat that. You were on half sketched, like rough sketches as the backgrounds of the of the content, because the guy who was sucked into the game or into the comic was the author of the comic and he had yet to finish the story. So fucking awesome. That's awesome. That's a cool idea. Yeah. I was going to say that when you were talking about like the game, when they really started figuring out how to make these games feel like like you wanted, I mean, this is this is such an obvious answer. But it really was the rocksteady Batman Arkham Asylum that was like the first one. I was like, oh, shit, I feel like fucking Batman. This isn't like an arcade game with a Batman, you know, skin put on to the the the character like this is this actually has some like the sort of feeling of oh, I'm this this badass with all these gadgets. And I like I like all the rock city games, but I have the most affection for Arkham Asylum just because it was like for me, it was like, oh, shit, they really figured this thing out. And then also, I just like like that it was more limited in scope. Like I think Arkham City is cool. But but I don't know. There's something about just like the the the confined nature of that game that I found so compelling. I'm a big Arkham City guy. I love that one. I was a little disappointed in Arkham Knight. But I think I do think asylum really did sort of like knock that door down a little bit, because you're also like you get the the the combat in those games are so crunchy and so fun and like just kicking the shit out of people as Batman's fucking awesome. But then doing the detective stuff. Yes, it's just like a lot of fun. And also, I mean, those voices that that sort of like is like the thing that's not like obviously derivative of the comic book, it's more from the the the animated series. But Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill reprising their roles as Batman and the Joker makes that game. So those games in general, just so fucking good. I also really love those insomniac Spider-Man games, you know, those are like but those I've talked about this before. The Spider-Man movie games from, you know, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies. The second one in particular is so amazing. And like you can I mean, it's like it's exactly what they figured out in these new ones, but on the PlayStation 2. Yeah. And it's it's insane to me that it even one of those. One of those games is narrated by Stanley and one is narrated by Bruce Campbell. Yes. And they have kind of funny voice performances in them. Yeah, you're right. I think those rocks those. Oh, gosh, Sucker Punch makes those in Somniac. Insomniac, excuse me. Yeah, those those are great games, but they are pretty similar to those PS2 Spider-Man games. Yeah, exactly. But then there's also a Spider-Man game. There was an ultimate Spider-Man game that was similar. Oh, yeah, sure. But it was based off of the MTV Spider-Man sort of 3D animated show. And that game is really awesome, too. It's Spider-Man, I think, is just going to work in a video game kind of because there are games that aren't like that. Like I really liked Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions, which is. Right. That's a Spider-Man noir in Spider-Man 2099. Yes, you get a pretty fun game. You get one Spider-Man. Yeah, you get those two Spider-Man's. But Spider-Man in that game, I think, is also is voiced by Neil Patrick Harris or something. It's just like it's a fun performance. Always doing close up magic. Yes, same part of Neil in Neil's contract. One of the games I'd like to bring up also as a comic book game is made from the comic book of a co-worker of Nick and my Rob Shrobs Skud, the disposable assassin. Skud had a full blown Sega Saturn game back in the day. I think it may have also been on PlayStation, but it's definitely on Saturn because that's the copy I had. And beyond it being just like a pretty fucking cool adaptation of the source material, what boggles my mind is. I know Shrob. Yeah. He is not like that. Like to be as young as he was when his comic book was adapted into a video game, I would have gone out and just shit on people's doorsteps. I'd have just been like, I'm King shit. I'm a monster. Now I'm a monster. I have a fucking I have a comic book that became a video game on systems that are out now, which at the time also this is the era of huge generational graphics leaps, right? Like the PS4 to the PS5, not an enormous difference. Like we're not like, oh my God, they look like people now. It's like, wow, they have more facial expressions than they did in the last generation. The hair moves a little better. Yeah. But at the time, the leap from, say, Super Nintendo or Genesis to the Sega Saturn and PlayStation was so monumental that it would have been as if you were looking at your thing being real. Right. Like you would have been like, oh my God. Have you talked to Rob about that? Was he involved in the game? I have talked to him. He was he had very limited involvement and kind of when I asked him, he was like, OK, like it was not like, oh, yeah. Like, wow, it was such a fun project. Like, yeah, it seemed like it was maybe a little bit of a frustrating experience for the person who created that series. But I've never played it. It was is the because the premise, the disposable assassin, is that like part of the gameplay at all in your memory or it's been so long since I played it. And honestly, when I played it, I didn't know Shrob. Right. So it was just a game. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It'd be the difference between like playing, you know, like like a night, you know, a nights of darkness or whatever. And then knowing the guy who wrote Nights of Darkness, you're going to have a different it's going to color that game a little bit. That was just me. I don't even know if that's a real game. It's kind of neat. The creator of Cool Spot game feels completely different. Kind of neat that Skud, which, you know, a very, very popular indie comic, certainly not Spider-Man like was able to make it to video game. Yeah, kind of neat. Yeah, you know, it is. It is. It's also funny because like Shrob is very much an incredibly talented guy, very funny, a great artist, a fantastic director. Just one of those guys was all around just an intimidating talent, but but a great dude, but he's not a gamer. And so, yeah, I remember we were watching, we were showing him the Donkey Kong, Bonanza trailer, and he's just like, why does Donkey Kong have a tie now? I can't get away from that. Man, he's had a tie for like 20 years. This is fucking good with the program. He rocks. And Skud is very cool. Yeah, I really like speaking. So speaking of Spider-Man, so I never played any of the Spider-Man games until Miles Morales. Great. And I was stunned at how good it feels. It feels so good. And that speaks to the thing that like you were saying about like games have finally come to a place where you can actually have the power fantasy translate into a functional mechanic. Like because previous to that, my only experience playing as Spider-Man in anything was Marvel versus Capcom 2. Oh, sure. Where he's got like he is one of the characters that you can play. And arguably that's a comic book game. I think very much so. And like, but it wasn't like you were controlling his swinging around on the screen. Right. He were following the same sort of combo patterns that Ryu or Akuma had. And and and they just had Spider-Man animations to them. Yeah, that they figured out that locomotion. They figured out how to make you feel like you're moving like Spider-Man is is really the most impressive thing about that game, about those games. And I think, you know, there's a little bit of you can argue, like, are those comic book games or is that game just a jukebox for the world's greatest music? That happens to have like playable parts. You could play the game or you could just use it to listen to the world's greatest music. Let me take you for a ride. But having like so having worked on some comic book games and then you get you later get exposed to a game like that, the The Insomniac Spider-Man's or the aforementioned Rock City Batman's or a game earlier than that incredible Hulk Ultimate Destruction, which also just really captures the feeling of being as powerful as the Hulk. Those are things like like, like, yeah, they did this right. And we were frustrated even the time when we were developing the fantastic four games because part of the issue is you're just constrained by those were movie adaptations. So you're trying to file all the template of the movie. So you're kind of limited in what you can do design wise. And also the fantastic four in particular, and this is a problem the new movie has. It's just they're just OP. They're so powerful that you really have to like neuter them to figure out how to balance the fantasy with how they can be like challenged by like a random scroll, you know, so it's it was it was a delicate thing to do. We're also a little bit constrained by the technology because that game was originally conceived as a beat them up that was licensed off the comic, not licensed off the movie. I love this is stuff I talked about when I went did my fantastic four game deep dive solo episode a while back. And then it was had to kind of be retconned into a movie adaptation once Activision got the movie license and decided to publish it. So all that stuff had to be grafted on to it. The character design had to go from Sue Storm as a comic book inspiration to Sue Storm as Jessica Alba, things like that. And Nick, Michael Chickless has notes. I listen to all his ideas. That's the thing you would get. You also would get essentially studio notes from both Fox, who was the license holder at the time and from Activision. It's kind of crazy that that whole team like, yeah, I guess I never really considered this that they are OP. But in like Superman has the same problem. Like you can make like a character so iconic and so like fun to read and stuff like that, but like performing as him is not as fun. Like reading his style. I love reading Superman comics. They're all really interesting. But like, I mean, every single Superman game that I've ever played is dog shit. There's been one good one. I don't know. Have I pitched my Superman game? I don't think so. I think Superman should be played like a speed run game. And here's what I mean by that. I think that the game should begin. You have full access to planet Earth, whatever that game world is. And instantly you have a quest list that fills up like chat on a YouTube video. And and you have to try and create a path where you save as many people as possible. And the game ends at a certain time or at the end of a story. But your goal as Superman is to save like to basically have to choose how many people die. Yeah. Because that's what Superman's like that's his stress is not like at any given moment, the most powerful person in the world. But he can't do it. He still can't literally can't save everybody. So if your quest list is like flying by you and you're just like immediately, the city is filled with exclamation points. Right. And in order to 100 percent, the game, you have to save something like 10,000 people before the time ends. Yeah. Then it becomes a speed run game. You're pitching Superman as the taxi from Crazy Tech. Yeah. As long as offspring doing the soundtrack. Is that the crazy taxi song? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do we all like the games? Guns Superman? I had fun with it. I love it. It's neat. I was great. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Rent, you see that James Gunn Superman? I have not seen it. Are you a Superman fan? Not really. Do you have you seen any of the Superman movies? No. Have you ever seen Lois and Clark with Dean K? No. Derri Hatcher. Have you ever seen a Superman movie? I love the Dean K. Anything Dean K. Did you ever watch Smallville or anything? No. So you just never, like, is there any comic book or is there any superhero you've ever been into? Not particularly. I've seen like a couple of Marvel movies. Don't, when you're editing this, do not trim that side. Yeah. I want people to pause and play and pause and play like something's wrong. Yeah. On the, your idea for the Superman game, maybe think about something that I think about when I'm playing those Spider-Man games, is that like, these are fun, these are great. It does not have the emotional conflict that Spider-Man has, which is the more Spider-Man does, the more Peter Parker's life gets fucked up. And so like, I would love it in those games if they were more courageous. If you like decided to go and stop a bank robbery, you missed Aunt May's birthday and she was mad at you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that would be if there were consequences to like doing the tasks. And now with them, they're just like, they want you to do every single task and play the game for 100 hours. But anyway, if you wanted to do the emotional Spider-Man thing, people should be mad at you more. I also think that maybe if you were doing this, which I applaud this concept of a game, the good ending should be not doing any of the helping in the city. Right. The emotionally good ending is you went to her birthday. You went on the date with MJ. You like all, like you satisfied the needs of the human man and you, and people were bettered for it. And you were like at the school when the play happened. Right, yeah. You supported your friends. And like in the distant background, the city has started to burn. But Peter Parker is nice and well adjusted and has a great life. But the good ending is like him like, him like shrugging off his traumas. Worked his way up at the Daily Bugle. Yeah. Gets a nice staff job. Yeah. This is sort of like, I mean, this is partially an element of the gameplay of Dispatch, which is in the tradition of those telltale games, which I want to talk about in just a second too, where there's like a, how would you describe it, Nick? It's like an OS where there's a map of the city on screen. And sometimes you have enough heroes that you can deploy to do the various things around town, but they're on cooldowns and more things will pop up. So you're not gonna, you're not, I mean, in my run anyway, maybe you can, if you time it right, and like you have everybody's stats lined up a certain way, but you're gonna send people off to stuff that other stuff is gonna get missed. Yeah. So it'll be like, well, whatever, there's this warehouse fire, and then there's also this riot at a baseball game, you know, and you just don't have enough super. And then also there's this villain robbing a bank. All these things are happening at the same time. You're superhero, like you just don't have enough of your team that you can deploy to cover all of these contingencies. Yeah, that is an interesting element, but also Matt, where I thought you were going with this, and along those lines is, you do have those discrete choices, those either or within the story elements, where it's just like, which character am I going to, you know, not just the love triangle romance part of it, but like, which character am I going to support? Which character am I going to cut from the team? Am I going to show mercy, or am I going to show vengeance, you know, like things like that? And this might, what city does it take place in? It takes place in the metropolis of Torrance, California. Yeah, that was great. The game's best joke. I was like, Jordan, you might be interested in it as it also is so Califers. Yeah, yeah, sure. It's so funny, because it's like there. Call me when it's set in Oxnard. Beyond Torrance. That reveal is so funny early on. That game rocks. I'd be interested in your perspective on that, Jordan, because that is a game that very much does not have superhero combat at all. In fact, the combat is pretty much limited to quick time events, which I eventually turned off, because I was just like more interested in the story and the management aspect. I've definitely been like following the fandom around that game. Yeah, I don't really, you know, do those story based games too much. I've bounced off a couple of the telltale games, but it does seem like Dispatch is really cool, has a cool art style, and I know people are very horny for everyone in Dispatch. It's very horny. It's legitimately funny. It's got great writing and very strong acting. But also, I think, I know far less about comic books and superheroes than you do, but I think it gets all that stuff like tonally so right. Like it's, I don't know, I was really impressed by it. There's something going on right now because it was just ported to the Switch and Switch 2, and there was like the nudity in the game and some of the profanities censored. Oh yeah, I mean, I've seen those stories too. The Nintendo strikes again. They've always been the kind of T-tode. I just think it's good. Well, because you can see Hog and Boobs in Cyberpunk. That wasn't a thing, but for some reason, it's got a blonde blazer's nip slip. It's blacked out. Wow. Did Cyberpunk get good, by the way? Cyberpunk got really good. Cyberpunk fucking rolled. I thought about getting it a couple of times. I'm like, did this get good? So we got great. It got great. It got great. It was a mess, and I even enjoyed it when it was a mess, but they patched the shit out of it. It's way better now. I gotta try it. Progression's way better, and the Phantom Liberty, the DLC, is fucking awesome. Yes. It's so great. It's a better story to me than the main game. I really love that story. But I can see why they decided to do it, because it's animated. I could see some executive be like, this is geared towards kids or whatever, because it's like a cartoon. But I'm also like, on one side, I don't want to defend it. I think it's annoying. But on the other side, everybody complaining online about it, I was like, you can see boobs anywhere. Sure. You can't. It's fine if it's not the one place where you're expecting to see it. But yeah, The Walking Dead Telltale Games, speaking of Telltale. Which are comic book games? Comic book games. I think those are great. We've done an episode on that, so we'll spend two years of time on that. Those games are awesome. I love them. And they, they, it's, I mean, whatever. It was Telltale's kind of first big salvo. I know they had games before that, but it's what got me into them. There is, there is like the, the, the experience of those games is, your mom is dying and your dad is dying. Choose me. And you're like, what? Mom or dad. This is not fun. No, but they did other comic book ones too. I know, I mean, people have a good, a great affection for, is it the Wolf Among Us? I haven't played those. Wolf Among Us is awesome. Wolf Among Us are like better than, than Walking Dead. And we'll see if Wolf Among Us two ever surf, surfaces. But that, that game is terrific. And then also, I've never played the Batman ones, but I heard people are, have affection for the Batman one as well. The Batman ones are great. I kind of, I mean, to me, it's kind of just like a slam dunk to adapt Batman though. Sure. Batman is just like good, like it's just good stuff. Well, that brings me back to the first comic book game I remember enjoying was Batman, the video game for NES, which is like a sneaky, decent platformer. It's kind of like a Ninja Gaiden. And yeah, it's, it's, it's again, just basically a Ninja game where you're Batman. But it does kind of, and it has really nothing to do with the movie that's, that's supposedly the adaptation of the 1989 Tim Burton Batman. But it was just like a, like a fun, you know, platforming slash brawling game. Layton to the NES's life kind of, like Super Nintendo was already out. There was a Batman game called Joker's Revenge. Okay. Just kind of a shooter with Batman in it. But he was really big. Big ol' sprite. And I remember that being the thing about like, look how big he is. He was so small in the other one. That still is a game that looks pretty neat because it was kind of late in the life cycle. Anyway, I have fond memories of like renting that from Blockbuster. I don't know if it's still good, but Joker's Revenge is a Batman game that I remember like. We talked about that when we were visited Street Fighter II and just how. And Mortal Kombat as well, when you did a Mortal Kombat anniversary collection episode of just like a big part of the early popularity of fighting games was big sprites. It's just like the early games like, oh, there's two characters on screen and they're fucking big. Yeah. Yeah, you could see their facial expressions, which you can't see on Batman 1989 for the NES. There are a purple dot. You have, you know, it's Batman because Batman is on the box. Heather, did you ever play the Sega Mega Drive slash Genesis X-Men? I did. You. So you remember the reset thing? Maybe. You had to reset the game in order to continue progressing. Yeah, I found someone summarizing this. This is from. It says on screen, sorry, it says on screen in order to stop this computer from. I can't remember if it was blowing up or whatever. You have to reset the system and you would move around on the screen trying to figure out how to press reset. Right. But what you were being told was to literally press reset on your Genesis. Crazy. A very Hideo Kojima game. No kidding. This is a someone named Joshua Barso. He had a run down of how this worked in their blog, which I'll just read, even though Heather did describe it pretty adeptly. In the second or last level, after the mojo boss fight, one finds a computer screen to destroy. Then you are told to quote, reset the computer. My friends and brothers spent an entire summer looking for a button. We scoured the level in the game to press and continue. The solution this puzzle is quite the astonishment. So this is like an area even before game facts alone, YouTube tutorials to how to get through these things. But now years after attempting failing and just moving on to other games, I happened to find the answer to reset the computer. The player had to press reset on the Sega Genesis console. Yes, I was taken aback. It felt like a slap in the face. Not only was a player supposed to think outside the cartridge, they're supposed to do something no gamer in the right mind would ever think of doing for fear of losing progress in the game. And to top it off, if you pressed it for even a fraction of a sentence of a second too long, the game would do exactly that reset the system and you'd lose your progress. So gamers supposed to tap the reset button, which brought up a screen full of numbers and moved on to the next level. Brilliant for breaking the fourth wall for gamers as well as being a horrible dilemma for kids. I did. Did you figure that out at the time? No, yeah, I didn't figure that out. My favorite part of that of that game, though, was that you chose your X men. And that's how you went through the game. So I always pick nightcrawler and I was like, oh, I like this guy. He's like the Genesis X men game was my gateway into the comics instead of the comics being the reason that I played the Genesis game. It was like one of the higher rated Genesis games at the time. And as the Sega kid, I was like, oh, I didn't know about X men. I only knew it as the cartoon on television. Right. But there are comics. And then I started reading the comics and God, I wish I still had those issues because there was so much money now. We have two people here today, Jordan and Heather, who are really into fighting games. And we are tired on Marvel versus Capcom, but I do want to dig into that a little bit more in the Capcom Superhero fighting games. But I'm also curious about y'all's takes on the Injustice series. Oh, those are neat. I really like those Injustice games. Yeah, do another one of those now. I am unfamiliar with the Injustice games beyond watching clips of them on YouTube. They're it's the DC fighting game series. Yeah, it's made by the same team that makes the Mortal Kombat game. So similar gameplay. You know, I think the thing about Mortal Kombat that will always kind of make it my side piece, as opposed to my main hang fighting game wise is that like the characters always feel like just reskinned versions of each other, like in Street Fighter, they all feel so different. They play so differently. The Mortal Kombat games are so fucking fun. But, you know, the character choice maybe feels a little bit arbitrary. And those Injustice games, maybe a little bit similar. The hero, you know, Black Canary does feel a little bit like Superman. But they are so fun. They have a crazy story that later got adapted into the comics that read ran for like five or six years. Wow. And the premise is bad Superman, a concept that's never been explored before. When you do cons, people come up to you a lot and pitch you their comic ideas. Nine out of ten times. It's one of Superman was bad. But when I came up to you once, it said, what if Superman was taller, like six eight? Pretty good. And I'm like, I can. Yeah, I have no power. But yes, please make that. This is a repeat of something I talked about when I was I was breaking out the fantastic four games by working on the fantastic four games. But we are members of focus testing them. And there was they would have different age groups of kids. And there was a group of kids once and there was like one alpha kid who was kind of like, you know, kind of everyone was kind of deferring to him. They were like 12 year olds. And he was like, basically like, like, like, you got to make some changes. And so the moderators like, OK, what would you do to make this game? Is like, like, all right, you can't just stop with the fantastic four. You got to throw a Spider-Man in there. You got to throw Superman in there. You need Robocop. Let's start showing off the other license. He's like, he's like, like, and they got to have guns. They got to have sniper rifles. And we're all like, this fucking kid. And then the hindsight, he was pitching Fortnite. Listen, eventually there's going to be a chapel road. When she comes up, you have to put her in. You've got to figure out how to size down a guy named Victor Wimba Nyama. Is he in it? Not a big deal. I did my look. We can't you can't you can't bring it up and not have me to be like, well, I was playing Fortnite today. No, you said you wouldn't. And. I want to hear about. And the the the the the the newest update dropped this morning that is the chapel road update. She's in the game. Unfortunately, it is so bugged right now that everybody in the game as a record is re reverting to default skins. So the only reason to spend money in Fortnite is to be able to see whoever you want while you're playing. And right now you can't see anybody. You can only see like the three default skins that come with the game. And and my my friend Miguel, who I was playing with, argued that like when your internet gets down or goes down for a significant portion of time, you get reimbursed every second that you're on Fortnite, that you are not getting to look at the thing that you paid money to to to see. You should get V bucks back. Yeah. And I agree with it. Yeah. Can we also talk about how Jeffrey Epstein had some V bucks? Can we talk about how and I forwarded this to you guys? How Jeffrey Epstein had a fortnight like he had it. He had a fortnight account. He bought V bucks. These are in the Epstein files. His account was Little Saint Jeff one, which is a pretty clever username. Yes. Didn't he? Oh, not that clever. Didn't he get kicked off Xbox Live? He got kicked off Xbox Live, I think, because he didn't help Bill Gates hide his STI from his wife. I'm so guilty. To his office. Delete his account. Literally. But the conspiracy theory that is bubbled up today is that somebody found the account on fortnight and it has post Jeffrey Epstein's death playtime. Wow. That he had that he got Silver Stat the account got Silver status after in theory, Epstein is is already gone. So the question is, was he escorted out of prison for a body double? Which in the, you know, in the photographs of the body doubles autopsy, Epstein's tattoos are not visible. Yeah. Did he go somewhere else in the world? Get bored. Start playing. Start fucking playing. I gotta squat up real quick. I miss my boys. Bin Laden is compound playing puzzle, Bob. Well, it's like, it's got a board. I gotta watch some hentai at a certain point. If if fortnight was the reason that people found out that Epstein was still alive, nothing would change. No, nothing would change. But it would become that. But fortnight would become it already is in. It has to be in like the congressional library because of it being in the Epstein files. Yes. But it wouldn't become the most famous game in history. Yes. For at least a while. Yeah, I don't know. It's always like because you there would always be things like like someone is playing World of Warcraft and like, oh, they they were in a party with Robin Williams, you know, or Andre Karolenko, NBA player. Like, you know, that sometimes that would that just sort of happen. These these still happens. People end up playing Call of Duty with with, you know, some athlete or some celebrity. It's weird for that to be Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, it'd be funny if he was bad at it. And it's dead weight. Hang on. It's funny if he's bad at it. It's really funny if he's good. You're right. It's pretty funny. You're right. I do. I I think I've talked about my affection for these games a little bit, but they're all sort of in the same thing. So I'll hit them all at once. The Marvel Ultimate Alliance games and the X-Men Legends games. Oh, yeah, those are fun. Cool. I really, really like the X-Men Legends games, weirdly, a little bit more because the Marvel Ultimate Alliance ones has, you know, all the Avengers like blade, all those sort of like all characters from, you know, just the various Marvel properties. But I just really like the X-Men. Yeah. So like there's just more X-Men in the X-Men ones. Well, it also just it starts to feel a little bloated at that point. Yeah, just kind of like, you know, what did happen with the MCU as well? Yes. And so, yeah, I'm like, OK, I'm going to whom I'm going to pick all these guys are like, or I could have like Gambit and Cable and Nightcrawler. Nightcrawler probably my favorite X-Men actually, too. I think he's great. Wow. And Beast. I love Beast. I like Jubilee. Jubilee? Jubilee, good X-Men. Good X-Men. I also, I mean, look, the movies have never really gotten Cyclops right. And I think Cyclops is fucking awesome. Cyclops is cool. I think we're, I think we were, I think people are, Cheddar Ray Chase does a great Cyclops rendition. Cyclops does. X-Men 97. It is awesome in the cartoons. Yeah. And in this X-Men 97 is amazing. It's like the best Cyclops we've had. I think we're, what Jordan's about to say, I think we're going to get a Cyclops for Demention in these, in these, what is this, Doomsday. I think they're setting up us for a new era of Cyclops. Isn't like a Cyclops solo comic out there now. So I think they they're priming us to like be in the Cyclops. I really, I really like those games. Can I ask a question. About Cyclops. Yeah, sure. Yeah, he's got two eyes. I know it's confusing. His power is just eyes, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I don't think it comes out of anyone else's eyes. No, but I mean, like it's not like, it's not like, in a run that I had not yet experienced that also he can hear very well. Like it's, like it's just eyes. He hasn't like powered up at any point or news. Cause like when Wolverine is established, it's not initially like, Oh, he's immortal. Right. You know, like that's like built out. Give those X-Men secondary mutations a lot. That's a move that they do. But I, I don't know if they've ever given Cyclops additional stuff. He just, he's just eyes and he's like hot as hell. Okay. Has, I mean, has he ever been bullied at Professor X's school? So I'm being like, so just eyes. That's it. That's all you call it. Eyes. Call me when you got ears. Call me when you got some cool ears. Instead of calling him four eyes, cause he has glasses that call him two eyes. Well, it's weird also because it's like. One visor. It's like he's surrounded by gods. Yeah. And he's just got eyes. I mean, pretty good eyes. It's pretty, I mean, you guys can fuck shit up. It's, it's a pretty bad situation. Yeah. You can't, he has to wear those that Ruby Quartz thing on his visor. He has to wear that. I know. It looks really cool. It does. Well, he can also wear glasses apparently. Just sunglasses. You have just different glasses. Has anybody in here taken a run at Marvel rivals the current most popular thing in the world? I have dipped into Marvel rivals. I found it fun, but also while playing it, I was just like, I wish I was playing Fortnite. Yeah. And so I bounced off it, but I was deeply impressed at how different each rival felt. Yeah. You know, like when you, when you drop into Fortnite, you're the guy, you're the same guy. You could be a default skin or you could be Chapel Roan, but Chapel Roan is going to have the exact same play style as the Terminator. But in Marvel rivals, I was like, oh, I'm, I'm swimming in the pavement or I'm flying through the sky and these are such radically different play styles. It was, I don't know, if, if I had that time and that brain space for that game, I can see myself becoming super addicted to Marvel rivals. How about you? I tried it because, you know, everybody was getting into it. And when I go to cons, that is now what everyone is dressed as, the Marvel rivals version of those characters. You know, I'm just no good at the team shooters. I don't, you know, I never played Halo. I kind of like the whole world of things kind of missed me. Yes. Like how it felt. Great, you know, great presentation, very cool. But yeah, I'm just no good at them. Do you like sort of like character action kind of games? Like is that like a type of like like the God of War games, for example? Oh yeah. I love those. Sure, I love those. Because the Spider-Man games, the Batman games are sort of that, but they're more of like an open world thing. Right. Have you played the Guardians of the Galaxy video game? I tried it and I thought a lot of things about it were neat. It was, you know, a little too cute, a little too chatty. I think I like, I like it when the superheroes chime in. I like it when you hear those catchphrases. They were just always chatting. They're chatting a lot. Pretty good writing, pretty good voice acting. It was just a little too much chatting for me. I had to sort of get past the chatter because I thought the story was really, really good. And I think there's something about the Guardians for some reason that like I find emotionally like sad, like they're like there's something there's an inherent sadness within that team. Yeah, those are sad people. And even the movies do really hit on this too. But like the two Guardians of the Galaxy video games that I've played, that one and also the Telltale one have both like really like like emotional stories. And like, am I about to fucking cry playing this thing? What are they doing to me? There's like a sequence in the really the square enix Guardians of the Galaxy video game where Peter Quill is having this like hallucination and he's back on earth and he's fighting apparitions of his like mother or something. And it's like it's awful. It's like it's like horrific, but it's really, really well done. And I think those games are so really great. And I was I'm bummed that there hasn't been a second one of that game. Because I really like that. I think it didn't sell well. But yeah, and like I'm part of the problem. I want to say this game is great and I never played it. And the same thing with like like the was the was it Marvel was the Sun's one called Oh, midnight sun. I also kind of want to try that. It's like it's great. It's awesome. And I just never got around to it. We should we should wrap this up. But just just to shout out maybe if anyone else has anything else they want to shout out. I was just going to reference first off the darkness, which was a a comic book game that came out in the 2000s based off of you may be familiar with the dark. I was not super familiar with the characters, but the game played really cool. And my understanding is that fans of the comic were like, oh, this is a really surprisingly good adaptation of this property. But then also I wanted to shout out a game even more more like worse received than Superman 64 Aquaman, who when I worked on the Fantastic Four games, one of the animators worked on Aquaman. And I remember talking to him about it again, I'm repeating something they probably said in the Fantastic Four episode. But that game was like just it was like a one out of ten. It was like barely. I haven't even heard of it. I didn't know there was an Aquaman. Yeah, it's it's really strange. It came out, I think, for the original Xbox. And I remember talking to this guy, very talented animator. I was like, I was like, so what happened in the game? He was like, well, I was the only artist. And I was like, oh, you're the only animators? Like, no, I was the only artist who was a three person development. Yeah, there was one programmer, one artist and one designer who was so frustrated he refused to work. So so so so. So there's just basically like they're like, here's the Aquaman license. Make a game team of three people. Yeah, in an era when tools were much cruder than they are today. So, you know, a lot of times there's an explanation for why these if I sound like I'm being defensive as someone who's worked on some bad games. A lot of times there's some reason for this that's structural as opposed to perhaps the talent of the developers. I really liked I just want to shout this one out real quick. Harvey P. Carr's American Splendor. That was good. Yeah, for the Game Boy Advance. Yeah, right. Boy Advance. Yeah, I'm playing Marvel Cosmic Alliance. Okay, you know, it is so fun. It's fucking great. That's awesome. Yeah, you know, pretty simple. It's a beat them up, but there's a little bit of depth. You can kind of like do challenges and unlock new guys. I got an arcade stick because I got that and this other game called Absolume. And I was like, these games are. I want to hear more about Absolume at some point. It's fucking awesome. OK, but I got this arcade stick. So I was like, I want to I want to play a game like that. How I would be playing it in an arcade. And it's a really fun experience to have. And you know how like we're talking about how it's like good when somebody's big, like, you know, like she hulks in it and she's big. But her like superpower, she like gets really big. Love that. Yeah, she gets real big. I want to shout out a game that is not based on a comic book. What? I'm just excited that you're about to do this. But is has the aesthetic of a comic book and uses the visual vocabulary of the comic book, and that is Beautiful Joe. Oh, yes. Beautiful Joe is a Capcom game that came out, I believe, for the GameCube originally and then branched out to other systems. It has not been a IP that has lived on. It is now, you know, more than 20 years old, but it was a fantastic and fun game. And it's a it's a bummer that that it has gone to sleep. A cool one to acknowledge. Capcom, do please just release it. I'm begging you. Please a port. Please, I'll do anything, anything. He means it. And I mean anything. He's making soup over here. He's got so much soup for you. All right, it's time for the question block. All right, these are all sourced from our discord. Discord.com slash wait. What the fuck? I think it's discord.gg. Jesus, Matt. You all right? Matt, are you crying? Hey, Matt. OK, buddy, there's a lot of websites these days. You've got Varong on your shirt. I do have Varong on my shirt. She'll give you power. Help me, Varong. My goddess has no dominion here. There you go. I can't believe it took this long for a Varong to come up. We're slipping. When I when I got my Varong tattoo, there was another guy in the in the shop and he was literally getting a tattoo of Jesus Christ. We're kind of the same, buddy. Both honoring our deities. Who is that saint? Discord.gg slash get played is the website. And here we go. This first one is from St. Andre. Hi, St. Andre. St. Andre. And they write, is there another game that should get a maker like Mario Maker? And for some reason, the first thing that pops to my mind, Pacman. Pacman makers a lot. That's Matt. That's a great idea. Really good idea. Make your sons really fun. Yeah, make different mazes. You come up with different ghost AIs. Yeah, you come up with like because you could get Pacman is simple enough where you could there could be things like you could figure out new power ups to design or whatever. You know, I like I like that a lot. Do you think they have a I mean, I don't want to get too crazy. I'm not trying to be icarus here with this. Do you think they can make Pacman big? Well, this is a thing. Pacman has been big. He's been big. He's been big. He's been big. He's been big. He's super Pacman. He gets big. You could take all the power ups from previous Pacman games. But maybe there might be there might be some this this gets a little complicated to implement. But if there are ways to like tweak the rule sets or yeah, have you designed your own power ups, that could be fun. I'm Pacmaker is good. I'm also thinking of this game. This game that I played on Steam. I can't remember what it's called, but it's like a racing game where you're building the track as you go. So you're it's like a roguelite kind of where you're like you get to the next gate as it were and you can pick the elements that get to get added to the track, be they you know, hazards or like curves to the map or whatever. So I'm thinking like go the next step. Do Mario Kart maker maker. That's a fun idea. You're making your own tracks with your friends and stuff. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Mario Kart maker. That's got all the ideas. I don't know how to say websites, but I got some pretty good ideas. Is it good? It is. You know, there's a maker element of a of a recent game that I thought was really great. There is a build your own fighter element of Street Fighter Six. And I feel like people don't talk about it enough, but it is a fucking blast. All of the like one player stuff in that game, I think is so, so good. Anyway, I love building my little fighter in Street Fighter Six. It was really fun. You can kind of like give them different special moves. And it's funny when like they look a little incongruous, like doing the Chunli spinning bird kick and then the Zangief spinning pile driver. Very, very fun. You can also make them ugly as shit. You can make them ugly as shit. I just like in that in that mode, in that particular mode, you can just walk around a city and punch somebody and then you're in a fight. Yeah, and it's fine. And they like it. They're glad because they get to fight you. I mean, my guy when I was to the Street Fighter Six single player, I just made his ass as big as possible. I'm dumping all my points into ass. No charisma. No speed. Then again, that's why you're sort of like, what's the ass even for? No charisma. Here's what I would say. And this is look, there's obviously like RPG maker. And I get a hey, you could go so far as to teach yourself a unity or a good dough if you really want to get into it. But like, like there's there's things like RPG maker that like to make an RPG from scratch, I would like to see something that is just just drills down character creation screens where you could just come up with different kinds of characters that you create, come up with different stat categories, come up with different classes you could roll, different fantasy races, whatever you want. Just a thing that you could really like figure out your own like that aspect of an RPG. And I kind of feel like laser focused on that. You could get to an insane level of detail. I don't know, which would be really fun in just in terms of like figuring out a theoretical design. I would like to make an FPS maker. And here's what I want. I want you to be able to design the, you know, the size of the arena, the speed at which your characters move, the kinds of weapons that you have access to. And a lot of this is like you can do this in Fortnite, for example, but to have a dedicated first person shooter online tournament maker, right, that was extremely simplified controls. Because it would be so awesome to make like a room the size of this recording studio and have it be a 256 player count where everybody has a bazooka. And like it's just a question of like who randomly survives. Yeah. Be a lot of fun to make. Don't try to beta test this here. What, in the room? Yeah. No, I wouldn't do that to you. OK, thank God. If you can figure out. Oh, thank God. If you could figure out specifically how to make, because this is an element of Mario Maker levels, but you can figure out specifically how to make a rage game maker. That would be fun. Like you're just making Bennett Foddy designs, like the most frustrating games possible. And it's just designed to give you all those tools. Whenever a Mario Maker level that is like purposely difficult pops up on like my algorithm, I just have to watch the mastery that I know I'm about to watch. Oh, I love watching those videos of someone like, you know, whatever, just doing a thousand attempts to get through this impossible level. Well, it's mastery on two sides. It's mastery on the player traversing the created map and then the design. The idea of that somebody sat down and made this treacherous map is really interesting to me, too. Great question. Yeah, great question. This next one's from DJ Crabhat. Hi, DJ Crabhat. What's the worst quote, Tetris effect you've ever had? Where did you compulsively like see blocks or have that experience with any other games? I have a specific answer because I think the tinniness of the Game Boy speaker was very resonant in my young years. So there was like a time when I was a kid and I was only playing Pokemon that I would just have the sound, the songs from that game ringing in my ears at all times. I would say that the first time I played Grand Theft Auto 3, I marathoned it for like 10 straight hours with my friend. We just were like, oh my God, you can do anything in this game. And then we went out to get dinner and we got in the car and both felt really freaked out. It was just, it wasn't because we were like, oh, somebody's going to rob us or somebody's going to hijack our car, but to suddenly be faced with real world freedom. You're like, I guess I could. There was like an overlay of choice that I had never, it was like an existential overlay of I could drive on the sidewalk and part of me thinks it's OK. Yeah, it also wasn't your car. You just like ripped somebody out of the car. There's so many prostitutes out tonight. Oh boy. I definitely remember that Grand Theft Auto 3, the novelty of that. And then seeing a police car that had its door open and thinking I could go in there and get a shotgun. Like it's just like, you know, it's it does poison your brain a little bit. If you ask them, they'd let you hold it. Well, if I asked them, yeah. I'm afraid to turn on the radio because it'll be too satirical. Well, yeah, I'm afraid of laughing my ass off, listening to the lasso. But drive by big, dick donuts or something like that. I do remember when I was playing the I think I mentioned this before, too, when I was playing the hitman, the most recent three hitman games. I remember walking down this street and seeing a security camera and saying out loud, I've been seen. Just like to know like nobody's after me. I'm not doing anything surreptitious, but I was very aware that there were cameras around for some reason. I would definitely say any game that has a lot of climbing. And again, you know, like, like, obviously, people think of like an assassin's creed, but like I like certainly like a mirror's edge or something where there's a lot of traversal. There's a lot of verticality and just movement. Any game with any sort of parkour elements that does get me when I'm just walking around the real world, just being like, I bet I could climb that. You heard this game, Karen. Yeah, no, Karen. Yeah, it seems cool. It does seem cool. I haven't played it. I haven't played it yet, but it seems it's a climbing game. Yeah, sounds like a game that's going to ask for the manager. Yeah. Wow. Karen. See, it's we don't it's not just us. Don't do it. Well, Nick and I aren't the only two funny people that exist. Jordan. Heather's right. It was bad of me to do that. I'm bad. This next one's from Forest L. Hi, Forest L. Forest L. Do you like kicking or punching more in video games? Fucking awesome question. Wonderful question. Such a good question. The other questions were terrible. They were good. If I have to pick one, it's a binary. I think I go kicking because kicking is so cool, especially like jump kicking, which is not really practical in the real world, but I think about jump kicking a lot. I think kicking looks cooler. I immediately does look cooler. I immediately went to God Hand in my head because you can create your own combos in that game, right? I actually didn't know that. And for me, it's punching. I like punching more than kicking. It's classic for a reason. Got more range with kicking, you know, put a little more distance between you and them. Maybe I'm going kick just for practical reasons. The spinning bird kick was already mentioned. You've got like Giles flash kick. There's a lot of like cool kicks, especially aerial kicks. I'm just I'm really into that. But the most fun part of Street Fighter Six is going up and punching somebody on the street. Yeah, but punching is better than kicking. You could also kick them. You can. And it seems like movie action scenes these days all include a jumping punch. It's like the jumping punch is very invoked. Always looks pretty cool. Kicks have fallen out of favor, it seems like, because I think there's a lot of like more MMA sort of influence now with the with the fight staging. And I'm just like, I don't know, let's bring some of that kung fu action. Let's bring that's because more kicks in there. Yeah, yeah. Huh. I hadn't really ever thought about it. That's why I picked it. But like, I do think kicking is kind of. But if you had asked me when I selected the question, I was thinking, we're all going to say punching, of course, we're going to say punching. But then you see here about kicking, kicking is cool. Follow up question, favorite kind of punch, favorite kind of kick. I really like a roundhouse kick, but I also love a sweep kick. Sweep kick. Good. I'm thinking like, what's that? Am I imagining this type of kick where like I'm picturing Trinity where she's like in the air and sort of like kicking like. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Scissor kick. Kind of like bicycle kick or something. Right. Yeah, it's really cool. Kicking's kicking's really cool. OK, best kick. We should all watch. Two two footed kick where you also fall. Oh, that's fucking awesome. You kick someone, but you also hit the ground. It's pretty good. Yeah, you're doing that out of necessity. Sure. You're not doing it because it's the best option. You have to do have to. And pest punch. It's got to be the show where you can write. Yeah. Not to mention. I really like an over an overhead punch. Oh, yeah. Which is like a haymaker, almost. Like a like over like somebody's coming in and they they they miss the arc of your body because you you happen dodge and you go over their extended arm to knock them in the head. That's I like that punch. Yeah, that's a good punch. Also nothing wrong with just like a really powerful cross. Like, you know, you kind of jabbed in there. And yeah, yeah. Dominant and just going in there, just punching the shit out of one inch punch. That's a good one. That is pretty good punch. I like the well, the five finger punch, certainly a Hawaiian. Wine punch is pretty good. I like that. How about a low blow? Low blow is pretty good. It's going to go. I like punches that incorporate blocking. So you'll do some of this, but then you'll maybe do like one of these and you'll get here with the other one. Yeah, that's a good punch. It's all fight after. OK. You said that you calmly. I mean, you win. Seth Roth writes. Seth Roth is my name. I kind of feel like the names have been good. And also the questions have been good. I think this is a good question. All right. Seth Roth, the guy who invented family guy in the world of final family. Seth Roth in his show tunes albums. Seth Roth writes. What are the best colorways on a console? Just got the analog 3D and transparent grape and fuck, it makes me miss the late nineties, early 2000s transparent colored plastic. I want to eat that shit when the sun hits it just right. I do think we've lost the plot with fun colorways. And this was one of the big things we said about the switch to actually not to relit again, not trying to get in trouble, not trying to do anything, not trying to get anybody upset. It comes in one color and it's just like black. Right. Whereas the other switch. Had colorful joy cons, had fun customizable and we're not really having that yet. There's a new set of joy cons. The color is around the sticks and in the little magnetic slot, but not really visible to my eyes. I think I think that there are two colorways that I really liked. And they were on the PSX and the Japanese Saturn. And it is almost complete white. It's like a white out console. I really like that aesthetic on a console. The PlayStation five doesn't do it. You've got a lot of black accents on the on the console. But like I like a and I also don't think the Dreamcast does it because the Dreamcast has a lot of pops of color like on the on the face buttons and also gray buttons on the actual machine itself. And every Dreamcast now is I think some shade of yellow. My first instinct was I really love beige colorways and like cassette futurism. And I was like, which console was beige? And the truth is there weren't any. No. Not like any mainstream ones. Like there there wasn't anything that had the like Mac classic colorway. Yeah, I wish there was more of a personal computer. Yeah, I'm thinking specifically of the Gamecube purple and actually that Nintendo purple the era was also used for the Game Boy Advance. That was a really good, really strong shade of purple. But another thing I think I'll say that is more about controllers is we've kind of gone away from multicolored buttons and now everything kind of just like sits in with whatever the color of the console is. Or and whatever the color of the controller is. And I don't know. I really like the Super Famicom, not Super NES, where you had four different colored buttons or the Gamecube. Same thing. Controllery had all the buttons or different colors. I don't know. I just thought that was kind of fun, even though it's more toy like. Yeah, I liked that too, even in respect to the PlayStation face buttons also. Right. Now those are just like the shapes are white or whatever the color of the controller is. But they had a distinct colorway and I liked that a lot as well. I'm trying to remember. Oh, I have a red and black PSP. I thought that was extremely cool. Oh, yeah, that's like I'm a cool teenager colorway kind of fun. Wait, I have another Setheroth joke. Yeah, go for it. Setheroth was supposed to be the sector seven plate collapse. But he overslept. That's yeah. That's really, really good. Yeah, it was really, really good and worth it. Because in the world of their world, that's 9-11. Yeah, yeah, that's what happened. In this in this one also Setheroth, he's going to be known for making cartoons. But then he's one day going to think, what if I'm just in these? What if I'm in it? No, you're a very good voice actor. Yeah, what if I'm actually what if I'm the star? Overstacked a little bit. And they walked it back. Setheroth is most well known for the time that Kamala Harris came on the show and he impaled her and stood up and held her over the desk. Yes. That's a Setheroth. We all remember that classic TV moment. We all remember it. Our favorite blooper. So tell me about the campaign. Tell me the one wing angel. And finally, speaking of from Be Fast, which Final Fantasy 7 character would be the best hang? The answer is Red 13. Red 13 is really cool. I was really hoping this was going to be a Verrong question. So we got this guy's way of pointing out my answer is Verrong. But if I have to go Final Fantasy 7. Verrong actually. Verrong is a fun hang. Yeah. If you guys done like Verrong drugs. If you done like Verrong is Verrite. Yeah. Yeah, we've done that. We've done that. If you done that. I have been kind of like waist deep in Final Fantasy right now. Yes. Remake, integrate. Cloud is so fucking annoying. Cloud, him being so mean to the women who want to sleep with them. Listen, you don't have to cloud. But he's such a jerk to everyone who's throwing themselves at him. He's got all these hotties. Just do anything he asks. Yeah. Was the question 7 or was it anybody? 7. OK. I kind of think I mean the answer. My answer is red 13. I think the real answer is probably Barrett. Barrett Tabara. Barrett's a solid dude. Yeah. You know, he's got your back. Yeah. He'd be fun to talk to. He's like politically strident, which I admire. Yeah, sure. Walks to walk. Yeah. My answer was going to be was going to be an NBC, not a party member. But Jesse, give me some Jesse. Jesse's cool, right? Everyone's like, oh, I love Tifa. Oh, I love Aerith. I love Yuffie. Here I am like, why can't I date Jesse? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Jesse's, yeah. Why not? Jesse's like what I need. If I can't have Vrong. I think my hang, my hang instinct is Kate Siff. Oh, yeah. And. Is a rascal. But I also imagine that it would be the beginning of a night in Vegas and the morning I'd be on the news. Yeah. Like if you hang out with Kate Siff. And you'd be like missing organs. Yeah. This is a bit of a scammer. You know, don't want to hang out with rude. No, thank you. No, thank you. I'm kind of just putting together that Final Fantasy 7 is a cat game. It is a cat game. That's kind of why I really like it. Yeah. That's why? Well. And other stuff. What do we bring your significant other home to your parents? There's like, this is my boyfriend, rude. What are you dating this guy for? Mom, dad. Cut on the nose. If you bring his glasses, I'll just have another pair in his pocket. I've just played that. Just be that guy. That's his whiskey. It's got to be the house. The giant house. The giant house. What do you want to hang out with the giant house? It's really hard to be. Don't attack me. I just want to hang out inside. Don't it go, we're buried. You're religious? How do I bring you over the threshold? Figure it out. And you love me. I don't know why it talks like that. That's this week's Get Played. Our producer is Rachelle Chen. Ranch Yard underscore, underscore star. Do you got any streaming you've been doing lately, Ranch? No. You can hear your podcast you can plug. Oh, sure. You can listen to the Defiles podcast where me and my friend debunked supernatural things that have happened to us and our friends. But do you it's not full of the bunking because I'm like it feels like you're kind of believers as well. Yeah, we're we're believers who don't want to believe. Yeah. So at the end of the day, we do believe. Our music is Ben Prunty. Ben Prunty music dot com, our art by Doug Brigade, signed Doug Brigade dot com, Merchant kinship goods dot com and our Patreon Get Played DLC has a bonus episode every Wednesday. Matt, what are we doing this week? Oh, well, this week we're talking about we're going back into the how did this get played era and we're talking about Sonic Unleashed with Jordan Morris. It's Jordan Morris week. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yep. Patreon dot com slash Get Played. Jordan Morris, the best in the business. The best podcast guest around. Predator Bloodshed is a series. Congratulations February 25th. Please plug away and then anything else you'd like to promote. Yeah, one more time. Art by the great Roland Boshi and Rory Coleman. Predator Bloodshed, it's out on February 25th. It's got Gore. It's got a couple of yucks. It's got a little social commentary. We think you're going to love it. Pre-order at your local comic book store. Or if you want signed by me copies in the mail, go to bits dot L Y slash cool fight, bit dot L Y slash cool fight. And you can pre-order them, get a mail to you from a great comic shop here in LA called Collectors Paradise. And I do a couple of podcasts on the Maximum Fun Network. Jordan, Jesse, go, which I think everybody's been on, right? Everybody here's been on and kind of a newish movie pod called Free with Ads, where if everything goes according to plan, we'll soon have an episode with Mr. Matt Apadaka. Wow, I love that. Not recorded. We'll see if it happens. I think it will. So check those out on Maximum Fun and that's all. I'm going to say good chance it happens. I think I 80 percent. I'm going to go. I'm in the high 90s. OK. The guys are going to be in that studio sharing some soup. Oh. Oh. We don't just like forget to record. It's like eating the soup. This is the hour of slurping noises. Our highest rated episode ever. Real quick, before we get out of here, Jordan, what's your favorite soup? Oh, don't make me chew. So I'm just going to say one black bean. But I don't know. That's a pretty powerful choice. Pretty good soup. And I hate to report, I'll do this. I'll hate to do this to you, Jordan, but we do have I regret to inform you. You've you got played. Fuck. That was a headgum podcast. Hi, I am Mandy Moore. Sterling K. Brown. And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast That Was Us Now on Headgum. Each episode, we're going to go into a deep dive. Yeah. From our show, This Is Us. That's right. We're going to go episode by episode. We're also going to pepper in episodes with different guest stars and writers and casting directors. Are we going to cry? Yes, a little bit. Are we going to laugh? A lot. A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man. Listen to That Was Us on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify. New episodes every Tuesday.